


The Only Truth That Sticks

by ShevatheGun



Series: The Mistress: The Rise and Regrets of Tora Naprem [3]
Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alternate History, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Animal Death, Asexual Character, Bajorans, Canon-Typical Violence, Cardassians, Gen, Major Original Character(s), Mild Gore, Minor Original Character(s), Occupation of Bajor, Pre-Canon, Suspense, Violence, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2018-05-18 07:23:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 45,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5905099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShevatheGun/pseuds/ShevatheGun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At Zarpek Fishery, Naprem begins to find her place in the burgeoning Occupation. But between friends, old and new, a sinister force is lurking, threatening to tear Naprem and her aunts apart - and it may be more near at hand than any of them realize.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Well Met

**Author's Note:**

> EDIT 12/09/2017: This fic was originally divided into four parts. For my own sanity, I have completely reconfigured it to allow for shorter (hopefully more frequent) updates. If you get alerts for this fic, Chapter 6 is a full chapter of brand new content. Thank you so much for sticking with me, friends. LLAP

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After taking her lashes at Rize, Naprem's reasonably wary about what the next camp - Zarpek Fishery - might have in store for her and her aunts.

**Zarpek Fishery, Yynys, Bajor – Winter, 2329**

* * *

> “I disagree. No, excuse me – I disagree, sir. I’m saying I disagree. No—Sir, pardon me, but you’ve asked me to speak, and I would like to speak. [sic] I disagree with the assertion that the only thing to fear during the time of the Occupation was the Cardassians. Unpopular though it may be to say, factually speaking, there were many other things that threatened the lives of Bajorans at that time, not the least among which were other Bajorans. [sic] I disagree with the practice of using horrors perpetrated by others to erase horrors we simultaneously perpetrated upon one another; horrors we continue to perpetrate to this day. We’ve been hurting one another for a very long time. I know we’d prefer to forget about that, being that, for a few short decades, the Cardassians proved so much better at it, but the practice is dishonest, and I don’t intend to act as though it isn’t dishonest for the sake of your comfort, Councilor, or for the sake of your defendant. [sic] To do so would be an insult to me and every other member of my profession. It would do a disservice to every Bajoran who was made to suffer at the hands of another – and I assure you, there are many.”
> 
> - From the testimony of Mara Ilra, Professor of History at the University of Bajor, at the war crimes tribunal of the Kohn-Ma terrorist Tahna Los, 2372

* * *

It’s three days travel to Zarpek. The guards let them out only twice to relieve themselves, provide them water and military rations, but they’re travelling along the Coastal Speedway, which is as familiar to Naprem as home. When they’re outside, ever so briefly, she can see the ocean through the trees, can hear its steady roar. People pass them occasionally, eyeing their transport and their restraints. Naprem smiles at them, brightly, though it makes her fresh scar ache. They avert their eyes as though she’s some sort of criminal, and the Cardassians force her back into the transport ship.

The air on the Yetit Coast tastes sweet – Naprem remembers that from her youth. Her mother had a friend on the Yetit Coast – a man, Naprem recalls, who she realizes now, as an adult, must have been her mother’s lover – with whom they spent a summer when Naprem was young. They used to go on drives together, travelling for hours along the Speedway, and she’s reminded of it now, of lying in the back of a personal shuttlecraft, watching the jungle whip past at breakneck speed, closing her eyes and breathing in the ocean air when she got too dizzy. This time, she gets dizzy for other reasons – hunger and fear and exhaustion chief among them – but when she closes her eyes, it feels the same. She feels small and safe again, just by breathing in that same, salty-sweet smell.

* * *

_Naprem and her aunts arrive at Zarpek_ by [shevathegun](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ShevatheGun/works)

The Cardassians open the doors to unload them once they’re inside the gates. Naprem steps out of the shuttle and looks around, eyes aching as they adjust. They’re in a sunshower, misty rain glistening gold and pink as it falls.

The camp is surrounded on three sides by gray carbonite walls, some thirty or forty feet high. Naprem can see the leaves of the trees over the tops of them; hear the hooting of tropical birds. On the fourth side, the dark, hard earth drops off in a sheer cliff, providing a dazzling view of the Bozn Sea, which lashes the coast.

Their transport is one in a row of shuttles, all offloading other Bajorans, many of whom bear facial scars like hers. Uru and Onea descend from the shuttle behind her, testing the moist dirt beneath their feet. Once they’ve all been unloaded, the Cardassians herd them towards a long, low building standing between them and the courtyard, moving with no notable urgency.

The doors open automatically, and Naprem finds herself in a surprisingly modernized security checkpoint. Uru and Onea are pushed in behind her, and they’re brought before a bored-looking Cardassian to be processed.

“Name,” he drawls, not looking up from his PADD.

“Tora Naprem,” she says.

The Cardassian glances up, chin in his hand, looking utterly blasé. “Accompaniment?”

“My great-aunts,” Naprem says. “Tora Uru, and Tora Onea.”

The Cardassian sighs and turns his head down, scrolling through the database. “Says here Dal Tirek put in for your transfer. You folks from Rize?”

“Yes, sir,” Naprem says.

The Cardassian nods a little. “Alright. You’ll head down the second hall to left—” he points, “—to the security checkpoint.”

They walk on to be scanned for weapons and patted down in a way that’s embarrassingly thorough. Once they’re through the security checkpoint, they move further down the hall to another, labeled “Requisitions”. The Cardassian standing at the kiosk is so tall his head almost brushes the ceiling. As they approach, he turns to the row of cubbies behind him, and pulls out a tightly-coiled, dark blue mat, a single pair of laceless shoes, and a small disposable box, which he slides across the counter to Naprem.

“That’s your bedding and toiletries,” he says. “No extras until season’s end. No replacements. Keep track of your things.”

Naprem looks at the single bedroll, the single box of toiletries, and the single pair of shoes.

“There are three of us,” she says.

“I can see that,” he says.

Naprem looks at Uru, who shakes her head sharply.

“We’ll make do,” Onea tells her, scooping the bedroll of the counter.

“Thank you,” Naprem says, taking the box of toiletries, not feeling particularly grateful.

The requisitions officer grunts and waves her on.

* * *

By the time they emerge from the security checkpoint, the rain has stopped, and the sun is setting. A brisk, ocean wind sweeps through the camp as they’re lead with the rest of the group to their barracks.

The barracks are _real_ barracks – several large stone buildings with doors and windows and long open hallways. On each floor, men and women are separated by waist-high stone walls that are interspersed along the center path. Naprem sees rows of bunkbeds, and even more rows of bedrolls carpeting the stone floor. Every step they take echoes through the place, and people’s conversations ricochet loudly off the walls in an endless, rolling chorus.

“Tora,” the guard says when they reach the third floor. “You’re in Sector 3K.” He gestures to their right, a square of space that’s crowded with young women talking and laughing, heedless of their arrival. Naprem can’t see a single inch of unclaimed floorspace. “Roll call’s at 400 hours,” says the guard. “Workday starts at 500 hours. You’ll all be in Factory 4. Don’t be late.”

And then, he walks on without so much as pausing to check that they heard him. The rest of the group follows along behind him, leaving Naprem, Uru, and Onea standing awkwardly off to the side.

Naprem is saved the embarrassment of having to stand there any longer by a young woman with short, dark hair, and a face as round as a marble, who catches her eye from where she’s sitting a few feet away, and stands up. She jogs over to them, light-footed.

“Hello,” she says, in a stiff, prim voice that doesn’t suit her.

“Hello,” Naprem says, feeling a little unnerved. The woman has dark, unblinking eyes, and she stares directly at her, which makes Naprem feel more thoroughly examined than the security check did. “I beg your pardon, we just arrived.”

“Yes,” the woman says. “Name?”

“Tora. I’m Naprem.”

“Onea,” her aunt says, coming forward. “This is my sister, Uru.”

“Tora,” the woman echoes, nodding slowly. She stares at each one of them in turn, seeming to commit their faces to memory. Then, she turns abruptly and cups her mouth, shouting across the corridor:

“Tora Naprem! Tora Naprem!”

There’s a low rumbling through the floor as everyone turns to look at them, talking amongst themselves. Some stand up and peer out at them, moving closer to get a good look. Naprem’s trying to mitigate her shock when a man crosses the room towards them, distinguished face twisted with surprise.

“Professor Tora!” he calls to her, and she recognizes him just as soon as he’s near enough to touch.

“Professor Suga!” she gasps, reaching out to grab his arms as he grabs hers. A smile breaks over his face and she can’t believe she’s seeing him. It feels like it’s been so long since she’s seen a familiar face that isn’t Uru’s or Onea’s. “You grew a beard!”

He has – it’s thin, black, well-kept – and he’s even more handsome for it, brown eyes still as piercing as they’ve always been. Even in a dirty, casual tunic, he looks like a gentleman.  He grins and it makes him look forty years younger, a young boy with a man’s face. “Not entirely by choice,” he tells her. “What have they done to you, darling? They’ve sheered you like a sheep!”

Naprem flushes with embarrassment, hands darting, self-consciously, to her fuzzy, nearly-bald head. “I’m afraid my stylist got a little overzealous.”

“I’d say so,” Suga agrees. “Prophets, I never thought I’d see you in here.”

“ _Me_ ?” Naprem asks. “What are _you_ doing here? I thought you were at the observatory in Ilvia.”

“I came back to Tazo to spend first summer with an old student of mine,” Suga sighs, shaking his head a little, gold _dja pagh_ jangling as he does. “The Cardassians arrested us both at a rally. I haven’t seen her since.”

“I’m so sorry. You’ve been here all that time?”

“More or less,” he says. “I heard they dragged you out of your house in the middle of the night. I’d hoped it wasn’t true – nobody had any idea where they’d sent you.”

“Rize,” she says. “Three days southwest of here, near Jo’kala.”

“A sheep farm, perhaps?” Suga asks, with a pointed look at her head.

“Close,” Naprem says. “Iridium mine.”

“ _Mining?_ Prophets be good,” he swears, shaking his head. He gestures to her scar with a strange reluctance. “I don’t suppose you received that in a mining accident.”

“Oh, no,” Naprem says with a maudlin grin. “This, I received very much on purpose.”

“Luckily for us, the Cardassians weren’t feeling _too_ generous that day,” Uru says from behind her, and Naprem starts – she almost forgot her aunts were there for a moment, and now that she turns to look, guiltily, back at them, she’s mortified to find Onea grinning lecherously at her, as though she’s done something to deserve it.

Suga seems to have only just remembered them too, because he takes Uru by the arm. “Where are my manners,” he says. “Miss Uru, Miss Onea, it’s lovely to see you again.”

“It _is_ , isn’t it?” Onea coos up at him.

“Ignore her,” Uru says.

“We only wish it were under better circumstances,” Naprem adds, since it doesn’t sound like they’re going to.

Suga looks back at her, and this time he’s the one ready with a smile that’s painful to look at.

“Oh, Professor,” he says, “Isn’t that always the way?”

* * *

It soon becomes apparent that space – like so many other things – is a rare and precious commodity at Zarpek, even moreso than it was at Rize. It takes almost two hours for Naprem and her aunts to find a place to put their bedroll, and they spend half the night trying to determine how to share it. Eventually, Naprem ends up half between them, half beneath them, each of them lying almost as much on her as the bedroll.

Roll call comes several hours too soon – the fatigue of travel still hasn’t left any of them, and now Naprem has a bruise from Onea’s bony knee butting up against her hip all through the night. They line up outside in the courtyard in the morning mist, when the world is still dark and gray, bitingly cold. The Cardassians walk slowly through the rows of them, data PADDs in hand. A few people they grab, examining their sleeves and their waists. One stops near Naprem, grabbing her chin and twisting her head this way and that, scrutinizing her scar. It’s a moment before Naprem realizes that this guard is the first female Cardassian soldier she’s ever seen. She’s square-jawed and broad shouldered, but her spoon is flushed an unmistakable cerulean that Naprem can make out even in the dark of early morning. She has cool, strong fingers.

“Good morning,” Naprem says, as she releases her. “Something I can help you with?”

The female soldier blinks, looking surprised that Naprem’s spoken. She frowns, thick, scaly brows drawn down.

“No. No talking out of turn,” she says. “Do it again and I’ll have to take disciplinary action.”

Naprem purses her lips and folds her hands behind her back.

“Tora, is it?” the female soldier asks, glancing at her PADD.

“Naprem. Yes.”

“You’re all on line. Report to Factory 4.”

“On line doing…what, if you don’t mind me asking?”

The female soldier sighs long-sufferingly, then tucks her PADD under one arm, and uses the other to backhand Naprem so hard it leaves her feeling like her head’s on backwards. She only keeps her feet because Uru grabs her from behind with a stifled gasp.

“Warned you,” the female soldier says, blandly, and Naprem can’t really argue with that. Then, without another word, the soldier moves to the head of their line and waves them onward.

They’re led down to the edge of the cliff face to Factory 4, and herded in like cattle. The factory lights come on as they enter, slabs of white light slamming through the space, illuminating row after row of conveyor belts that lead from one end of the factory to the other. As they walk in, the wall of shutters at one end open, humming as they ascend, letting in the biting chill of early morning and the salty smell of the ocean. On the other end of the factory, several more columns of light illuminate huge, glossy vats that wait at the end of the conveyor belts. There’s a sharp, electronic noise – the vats illuminate from within, rotating slowly, then shuddering back into place with a loud _thunk._

Naprem feels Uru’s hand still knotted in the back of her uniform as their group – some two hundred Bajorans – disperses, people walking through turnstiles to enter the factory, holding out their hands underneath a small dispensary for cleansing and spray-on gloves. Naprem follows suit, trying to see how they do it; she mimics the women in front of her and her aunts do the same. The cleansing stings a little – the gloves snap to her skin, far too tight for comfort. Then, they step out onto the factory floor and everyone is moving with purpose, and Naprem is utterly lost. She looks around for instruction, but no one provides her with any.

“This way,” she tells Uru, as if she knows what she’s doing – Uru waves to Onea and they hurry over to the nearest conveyor belt, trying to find space to stand. Naprem finds a place near the open shutters that stare out over the cliff, but a woman jabs her on the shoulder with a bony finger.

“You’re in my spot,” she says, her tone accusing.

“Oh,” Naprem says, moving out of her way. “Pardon me, I didn’t know.”

They move further down the line, and the same thing happens twice more. The third time, a woman grabs Onea and shoves her aside, and Naprem feels something seize inside her.

“ _Excuse_ me!” she says, catching Onea even before Uru does, flabberghasted.

“Find somewhere else!” the woman snaps. She has a long, thick braid trailing down her back and Naprem has such a strong desire to yank it that she very nearly does – it’s Onea who slaps her hand down, smiling at the woman again when she spins around to look at them, clearly wondering what the sound was. Onea puts on a beatific smile, beaming at her.

“Our apologies, child,” she coos, in her best ‘kind vedek’ voice. “We didn’t realize they’d stopped using manners where you come from.”

She grabs Naprem’s hand, then, and they march off to the delightful sound of the woman’s gasp of offense. Naprem seethes, quietly, trying to keep herself calm.

“It’s too early for this,” she gripes.

“And I’m forty years too old to be breaking up your fights,” Onea scolds her, squeezing her hand all the same.

“Children these days,” Uru chides, peering around. “No respect.”

“The next time you want to start a brawl,” Onea tells Naprem, “schedule it for after lunch. I’ve got a bit more energy then.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Naprem says, just as the regret begins to set in. She can’t believe she was so ready to fight that woman over so small a provocation.  She squeezes Onea’s hand and blushes, feeling childish.

Onea seems to sense her train of thought and pats her forearm reassuringly. “Patience,” she tells her. “We’ll find somewhere.”

It’s the female soldier who interrupts their search, coming up behind them as they approach the front of the line.

“What’s the problem?” she asks, gruffly. Her tail swings behind her slowly. Uru noticeably shrinks away from her and Naprem, still feeling both testy, puts herself between them.

“Just trying to find space,” she says, wondering if the next beating she’ll get will be for fighting one of the other workers or for insubordination.

The female soldier looks at her, and then at the line. Then, she shoulders past, reaches between two other workers, and forcibly shoves the line open.

“Found it,” she grunts.

“I—” Naprem tries, blinking with shock. “Thank you.”

“Much obliged,” Uru says, quickly.

“And what is _your_ name?” Onea says, stepping into place.

But the female soldier just walks off without giving them a backwards glance. The workers around them glare as they cram in, but eventually shoulder over, giving them room. A siren sounds across the floor and everyone shuffles in, gloved hands moving in to hover over the conveyor belts. Naprem moves her hands to mimic them, feeling apprehensive.

A second siren sounds, and the conveyor belt starts with a hum, beginning to move beneath their hands like a road. At the far end of the factory where the shutters stand open, two thick cables begin to wind into wheels behind the corners of the doors with a click and a shudder. For a moment, nothing happens – then, like the mist itself, a white curtain of net begins to rise from the space below the shutter, and in a few moments, the sharp, salt smell of the ocean rolls across the factory floor. The damp nets begin to wind into the wheels overhead, and then there’s a flash of movement and another, and the nets begin to move with the errant flip of a thousand tiny, silver bullets – schools of selil fish, fresh from the harbor below.

The workers closest to the shutters hurry forwards, grabbing the fish from the nets with nimble hands and tossing them back. The first one lands on the conveyor belt with a wet slap, and then two more join it. Behind the workers that tend the nets, the second and third workers grab the fish and snap their spines like twigs. The sound makes Naprem jump, even muffled by distance. They toss them back on the conveyor belt and another workers snatches them up and begins shearing their scales off with their bare hands. They pass them down the line, silver scales scattering across the floor like confetti.

When the first fish lands in front of Naprem, she freezes. She looks at it, all pink, still-living flesh, stripped of its natural armor, gills still fluttering feverishly, large, unblinking eyes dewy with blood. She feels her whole body lock up with a mixture of horror and revulsion.

It’s Onea who reaches past her, scooping up the fish and checking it for remaining scales in a clinical, business-like manner. In a matter of seconds, she’s assured it’s clean, and passes it to Uru, who puts it down on the conveyor belt so quickly it nearly shoots off into the hands of another worker.

Naprem’s still struggling to breathe when her neighbor hands her the next fish. Without even asking, Onea reaches over and takes it, checking for lingering scales just as quickly as she did the first time. She finds a few behind the gills and around the eyes, and flicks them off in short, fluid movements. She nudges Naprem gently with her hip.

“Go on. You just hand them to me,” Onea says. “Here. Talk a little. You know the history of fishing in this region, don’t you?”

“I…” Naprem struggles to find her words again as her neighbor hands her another fish. Onea leans into her a little and Naprem passes it to her, still gagging a little on her words. “A little,” she says, trying to figure out if that’s true.

“We’re near Fynt, aren’t we?” Uru asks, putting the clean fish down on the belt.

“Probably closer to Yynys,” Naprem says. “Fynt’s further inland.”

A fish lands in Naprem’s hands and this time she passes it to Onea automatically. There’s a short row of spines left on its back; Onea sweeps them off with her thumb.

“Yynys has fisheries, doesn’t it?”

“Well,” Naprem says, “most settlements along the Bozn do. They’re a staple of the coastlands.” The next fish comes, and to Onea it goes. Its slippery body makes Naprem feel a little sick, but she keeps going, trying to keep her mind on her knowledge of the area. “Six hundred years ago, the natives would spend most of the year out at sea and only come inland for second summer. It was the only season where the tides were high enough to ascend the cliffs, at least with the technology they had then. Nowadays, fishing still accounts for a large amount of the local economy. Having these factories confiscated must be devastating, at least from a socioeconomic standpoint.”

“What are you,” her neighbor grumbles, “some kind of expert?”

“She’s a _professor_ ,” Onea says, smugly, as Naprem takes the fish from their hands.

Naprem’s neighbor scoffs a little, shaking their head. Naprem feels her insides rock again, tighten and slosh around, and she feels even more ill than she did before. At the end of the conveyor belt, fish are dropping into a chute that runs into the vat, tails flopping feebly, and being liquefied in an instant, bones and all.

Onea reaches over and pats her wrist sharply.

“Go on,” she says, pride in her voice.

Naprem takes the next fish and hands it off, and begins to speak, haltingly, about the effect of foreign invasion forces on domestic economies.

* * *

They keep working for hours, bare skin as cold as fish flesh as the sun slowly rises outside, streaming in through the open shutters. Around mid-day, the siren sounds again and the conveyor belts stop, and they’re released from their stations for their mid-day meal. Naprem’s almost loathe to step away and lose her place, hard-won as it is, but the guards come through and herd them away from the machines, back through the turnstiles, where the dispensaries suck up their gloves and spray down their hands. The cleansing stings more the second time around. Naprem’s hands are pink and raw, and feel a little swollen.

They’re led to the courtyard, where they’re forced to stand in line and wait to be served lunch at a small cart manned by only three Cardassians, who seem content to move at their own pace. When she reaches the front, Naprem’s rewarded with a bowl of the same slop they served at Rize, smelling even more strongly like algae than it did there. She wrinkles her nose in disgust.

“Bowls back here when you’re done,” the server says, patting a replicator pad at the edge of the cart.

Naprem waits for Uru and Onea to be served, and then they’re forced to look around in vain for space for the third time in two days. Every inch of the courtyard seems occupied, with Bajorans crowded together on every available surface, sitting on the ground in what seem to be organized enclaves. Naprem can’t tell if there are any rules she’s obliged to follow, but she can tell there’s an order to the chaos – little cliques assembled to carefully exclude any interlopers, just like the barracks, and just like the factory lines.

She’s saved a shameful walk around the courtyard scrounging for space by Suga, who appears as though summoned by her distress.

“Professor Tora!” he calls from across the courtyard.

“Professor Suga,” she says, sighing a little with relief. “Good afternoon.”

“All the better for seeing you,” Suga says with a grin. “Come, sit with us. I’ll introduce you to everyone.”

‘Everyone’ is a group of about fifteen, mostly young women, sitting on a cluster of rocks overlooking the sea. Suga approaches and they all look up, silently scrutinizing Naprem, all wearing expressions of vague suspicion.

“Friends,” Suga says. “This is Professor Tora Naprem, and her esteemed aunts, Dr. Tora Onea, and Miss Tora Uru.”

Onea grins smugly at Uru. “ _Esteemed_ , he called me.”

“Sit down,” Uru says.

One of the young women leans forward – Naprem recognizes her as the woman who greeted her yesterday, with her dark hair and dark eyes that look like they each hold a separate galaxy.

“Where did you teach?” the woman asks.

“Professor Suga and I taught together at Dutan University in Musilla. Before Dutan, I taught at Naghowa, and at the University of Bajor before that.”

“Mm!” another young woman says through a mouthful of slop. She swallows, then continues. “I think my brother took your course at Naghowa. Do you remember teaching a Pama Niman?”

“Pama Niman!” Naprem exclaims, surprised. “As if I could forget – he wrote one of the best student assessments of the longterm effects of civil disobedience I ever read.”

The woman laughs and grins – she’s beautiful, curly headed and cute with short, rounded ridges on her nose. “That sounds like Niman. I’m Pama Wysa. It’s a pleasure, Professor.”

“And you’ve met Taya,” Suga says, gesturing to the young woman with dark eyes.

“We’re all old students of Suga’s,” Taya says, in that strange, prim voice of hers.

“All of you?” Naprem asks, and she’s too crestfallen to hide it properly. Pama looks perplexed, but Suga’s brow immediately softens with understanding.

“After they came for us, they came for our students,” he tells her. “Most of the universities have shut down now, from what I hear.”

Naprem puts a hand to her aching chest, feeling unmoored. Onea shakes her head, sharing a look with Uru.

“What’s this world coming to?” Uru wonders aloud.

“I’m not certain myself,” Suga admits, looking at Naprem. “But better that we find out together. I feel blessed to be surrounded by so many familiar faces.”

Naprem feels quite the opposite of blessed – loss is festering her chest, drawing its claws slowly over her mind, leaving open sores in her stomach. She feels to blame for the suffering of every student she’s ever had. Where are they all, now? Are they safe? Is anyone fighting to protect them the way she would?

“I’m not sure I share in your optimism, Professor,” she murmurs.

Suga frowns, but nods sympathetically, and Naprem is both profoundly relieved and a little distraught to have him there, knowing her as well as he ever has.

* * *

They eat with Suga and his students every day after that, and life – as it is keen to do – establishes a rhythm. Every day they wake before the sun, march downstairs to roll call. From roll call, they march to the factory, where they tear the scales from the skins of fish for hours, until their fingertips are raw and pink and their hands are sore. From the factory, they march to lunch, and then, from lunch, they march back to the factory. Soon, Naprem hears the fearful whirr of the liquidizing chute in her sleep, sees fish eyes in every glossy surface. She spends most of every evening trying to forget the dying gasps and slippery skin of every fish she held in her hands that day.

Life at Zarpek is both better and worse than Rize, in that way. The guards are notably more lenient – not so caught up in petty conflicts and power struggles – and the workers are given considerably more time to themselves. They have an hour to eat their midday meal, and an hour after their shifts end to wander the grounds, or to talk in the barracks before lights out. Lights out is only loosely enforced, with many groups clustering together to talk long after dark, and the workers are allowed to visit the lavatories in the middle of the night if one of the guards agrees to accompany them. The facilities were built by Bajorans, and easily cater to Bajoran needs. They’re kept relatively clean, and as orderly as spatial needs allow. Sometimes, it reminds Naprem of life in prison, and not in a particularly bad way.

But the work is much harder at Zarpek; much more repugnant, and much more dangerous. Naprem quickly learns that working on the line is one of the safest jobs in the camp. Below the factory, at the foot of the cliffs, Bajoran workers are responsible for driving fish into the nets for the factory workers to sort, laboring in the hungry, perilous surf, and several of them each week are swept out to sea in the strong undertow, never to be seen alive again. Once in a while, the bloated bodies wash up on the rocks below, or, worse, are caught in the nets trawling up to the factories. It only takes it happening once for Naprem to recognize, with horror, the smell of waterlogged, rotten skin on the ocean wind.

A few workers are assigned to the cliffs themselves, lowered on tethers to gather shellfish and the eggs of seabirds from the crags in the rocks. Suga is one of them – every day he scales the walls, earning thick callouses for his trouble, searching for anything living to add to the nets that trawl up the cliff face. These too are collected and sorted by factory workers, who feed them into vats where they’re liquefied wholesale to pink protein paste. Other workers operate the lines on the other side of the vats, where the paste is freezedried and separated into perfectly sized cubes to be shipped to Cardassia Prime.

“I don’t understand it,” Naprem finally tells Suga one day. “Strip mining made sense to me. But food production? It doesn’t add up. The Cardassians have replicator technology, what do they need food for?”

Suga shakes his head a little. “I study celestial bodies, my darling. Not people.”

Taya overhears them and fixes Naprem with a dark-eyed stare. “Why should there be any rhyme or reason to what they do? They’re Cardassian. They take. It’s in their nature.”

“Because there’s always a reason,” Naprem says, trying not to be too overbearing about it. “Behavior – no matter how automatic – is _never_ without reason.”

“I think her point is,” Pama says, always with her mouth full, “why should we care? The Cardassians are our enemies.”

“That’s precisely _why_ we should care,” Naprem insists. “How are we supposed to oppose them if we don’t even know why they’re taking what they’re taking? How can you ever hope to subvert an enemy you know nothing about?”

Taya and Pama look unconvinced, but Suga smiles at her, slow and fond. “An interesting question,” he says to his students.

“I suppose,” says Pama. And that’s the end of it.

* * *

The work isn’t the only thing Naprem comes to dislike at Zarpek – the people are, too. Most of them are from the surrounding area; seamen, fishermen and algae farmers, the odd geologist or climatologist, a few local business owners. Most worked at this very factory before the annexation. Most even lived on the grounds, in the barracks with their families. Now, they do the same thing as they did before, except that now they work for the Cardassians without pay. They’re cliquey and unfriendly to outsiders, and Naprem doesn’t particularly blame them. She feels as displaced as a child at a new school, as unfamiliar with the people as she is with the landscape and the weather. Everything is new and different in the most unpleasant of ways; at least in Rize, she knew what to expect from winter. In Zarpek, the cold is everlasting, so that she doesn’t even know when the seasons change.

She does her best to adjust. By mid-winter, everyone knows her as “Professor,” something that she finds bittersweet – out of obligation, people are more cordial towards her, more permissive of her clumsy novelty. Onea, too, is soon known as “Doctor”; Uru as a dancer. But in many ways being called “Professor” by strangers – or even by students she’s never had – feels like a slap; a callback to a now purely hypothetical position she held far from here, an invocation of a profession which she no longer has, which, if Suga’s tales about the outside are to be believed, may no longer even exist. “Professor” is an excuse not to know her, to hold her at a distance; it is a title that designates her the eternal outsider, the unwelcome guest. She feels her alienation distinctly each time someone calls her “Professor” because they clearly do not know her name, and – even more clearly – have no desire to ask it.

Suga, in many ways, is her single respite. She takes to joining him after work on his evening strolls around the courtyard, talking about whatever comes to mind, both because she likes to, and because it reminds her of simpler, happier times in kinder climates. Sometimes, they reminisce together – about old students and old colleagues and old curriculums, about failed joint ventures and small, private successes. But this often proves a deeply painful exercise – a practice in opening and salting wounds on their hearts that have only barely closed – and so, more often, they avoid it, speaking mostly on more immediate, or more abstract topics.

Occasionally they’re joined by Taya or Pama, though Naprem prefers to be alone with him. Pama often speaks over her in her eagerness, and Taya almost never speaks at all, and stares at Naprem for the entire hour, which Naprem finds deeply unnerving.

When she asks about it, Suga simply smiles his disarming, boyish smile and says, “I don’t think they know what to make of you.”

“I think I’m fairly easy to make out,” Naprem says, uneasy at the thought.

“Oh, my dear Professor, you mustn’t take offense,” Suga says. “I don’t mean they dislike you. Why, to know you is to fall in love with you – your energy, your poise.” He looks at her in a way Naprem can’t decipher, eyes deep with something. “Your beautiful, brilliant mind.” He smiles again, smaller this time. “I think they struggle to believe you’re real…as I so often do.”

“Sometimes this all feels like some strange dream,” Naprem agrees, looking out at the ocean. The pink, pock-marked face of Derna is rising slowly over the horizon, its corona like a blooming rose over the misty Bozn Sea.

“Not a nightmare?” Suga asks, tone surprisingly cool. Naprem looks over at him to find his face strangely blank, and feels she’s said the wrong thing.

“I don’t meet you often in my nightmares,” Naprem says. “At least, not living.”

Suga smiles slowly, but this time, it seems unwilling. “You have a kind heart, Professor.”

“A kind imagination, perhaps.”

“Perhaps both,” Suga says.

Later on, at lights out, her aunts tease her, as they often do.

“That boy likes you,” Onea whispers in her ear, once they’ve arranged themselves into their painful nightly tangle.

“Professor Suga is a man,” Naprem whispers back. “Not a boy. And of course he likes me – I like him. We’re friends.”

“I mean he _likes_ you,” Onea whispers. “Not in the purely friendly way.”

Naprem tries to stifle her automatic revulsion at the thought. It’s not personal – she’s never felt comfortable with this sort of talk. There’s a fear in it; something strange and sinister that threads through her blood at the mere mention.

“Auntie,” she chides. “Professor Suga is my friend. Don’t diminish that.”

“I’m not!” Onea frowns, sitting up to give her a stern look. “You’re just oblivious to these things, that’s all. I’m trying to help you.”

“Oh, leave her be,” Uru whispers, leaning her head into Naprem’s shoulder.

“I’m _helping_ ,” Onea insists. “You should listen to me,” she tells Naprem. “I know these things. They used to call me ‘the matchmaker of Musilla.’”

“They used to call you ‘the _meddler_ of Musilla,’” Uru whispers. “If she wants to see it, she’ll see it. If she hasn’t yet, she’s happier that way. Leave her be.”

She knows Uru is trying to help, but it’s those words that make her feel sick to her stomach all night and well into the next day. Ironically, it’s Suga himself who cheers her up at their midday meal, when he invites her to join him in an impromptu lesson on the history of Bajoran spaceflight. His familiar smile coaxes her back into complacence. They’re the same as they’ve ever been, she thinks; no strange, unwelcome feelings between them. It’s Onea who wants to see things where there are none. No doubt she misses spying on the domestic drama of their neighbors back home – the fabrications of a bored, cunning old lady, that’s all it is.

When the siren sounds to call them back to work, she catches Uru’s hand and kisses it.

“What’s that for?” Uru asks.

“Meddling,” Naprem says, bursting into laughter when Uru swats her in the arm and pretends to chase her back to the factory.

It’s banality that leads her to complacence, more than anything. Winter sinks in around them like a bruise, and the only place that’s warm enough is the barracks where they’re all crowded in together, still sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder. But the guards only keep watch over them, mostly. There are no public executions, no floggings, no sensory deprivation chambers. The rules are fairly reasonable, and discipline is dispensed quickly and sparingly, without spectacle. Compared to Rize, life at Zarpek is very uneventful during those first few months, and by mid-winter, Naprem finds she’s adjusted most alarmingly to the constant feeling of un-belonging that follows her everywhere, to the way the smell of fish makes her want to vomit, to carefully cleaning blood out from under her nails, to the sight of her scar in reflective surfaces. She’s adjusted. She’s gotten used to all this. This is what her life is now, she thinks, in a rare moment alone, staring out at the ocean, waiting for Suga to join her in the courtyard. This is the status quo.

It’s mid-winter before anything truly exciting happens, and once it does, Naprem promptly wishes it hadn’t.

* * *

She’s grown accustomed to seeing the female Cardassian around – Glinn Zevat, Naprem’s heard her called. She’s a tall, broad woman, and walks everywhere with purpose, trailed by a small group of soldiers who all look at her like she’s a Prophet made flesh. As far as Naprem can tell, she’s the overseer of Factory 4, and maybe most of the camp besides, but it’s hard to know, if only because she never seems to bully or harangue the workers in her charge. Mostly, she supervises them: watching them work, breaking up fights, delegating when she needs to. She leads the soldiers that herd them into the factory in the morning and herd them out again at night, and for their mid-day meal. Some nights, she stands guard at the entrance to their floor. She becomes a familiar feature in the background of Naprem’s life: a part of Zarpek’s landscape, like the cliffs and the factories and the tall, surrounding walls.

One afternoon, when the sea breeze is blowing particularly strong, clipping over the rocks and pushing under Naprem’s sleeves and in through the back of her collar, buffeting the new springy tufts of hair on her head, she finishes her meal more quickly than usual, and slips, as unobtrusively as possible, back into Factory 4. They close the shutters at mealtime, and pump the factory full of warm air to re-energize the Cardassians, and though she’d usually find it absurdly hot, today it makes her feel a bit Cardassian herself. She tucks herself carefully against one of the pillars near the entrance, sighing with relief as the cold’s chased out of her clothes. She can finally feel her fingers for the first time all day – they ache, but it’s nice to be sure they’re there.

The factory is relatively empty but for a few Cardassian guards milling around. She doesn’t know if she’s allowed to be in here – there’s no explicit rule against it, but none of the other workers are, and so she keeps quiet and still, eyes down.

She stays that way for a while, warming her hands, resting against the pillars, curling her toes inside her shoes. Her hands and ears and nose ache from the cold, and her feet ache from standing on them all day. But none of the Cardassians seem to see or care that she’s inside, and the warmth is luxurious. She almost feels peaceful – satisfied, at least, soothed by the quiet and the heat.

It’s the sound of an unfamiliar voice that draws her out of her reverie; someone’s speaking with Glinn Zevat near the vats, their voice sharp and quick, ringing out over the factory floor.

“Well, this batch is free of contaminants, but we should really be monitoring them more regularly. Can’t you find someone else to run the scans?”

“Too much of a security risk,” Zevat says, flatly.

“It’s just that I’m very busy,” the other says. “You can’t imagine what it’s like for a person in my position.”

Naprem leans forward, peering carefully around the column. Zevat is standing with her back to the conveyor belt, arms folded, speaking to a short Bajoran man in a bright yellow tunic. His dark hair is twisted up into a bun at the back of his head, and he has a tricorder clutched in one bony hand. Naprem can’t see his face, but Zevat looks torn between boredom and exasperation, as always. Her tail flicks slowly with idle impatience.

“If you have an issue with your accommodations, you can take it to Gul Zuvun.”

“It’s not my _accommodations_ I take issue with!” the Bajoran says, sharply. “I’m senior staff, I shouldn’t be… This,” he says, waving the tricorder around, “is grunt work. Surely you can find someone else to do it.”

“Zuvun wants you doing it,” Zevat says.

“I am an _overseer_ ,” the Bajoran insists. “I can teach someone else to do it. Not one of the convicts, obviously, but we have plenty of trustworthy people on staff here at Zarpek, surely—”

“Look,” Zevat says, and Naprem can tell her annoyance has overwhelmed her patience. “If you have an _issue_ , you can take it to Gul Zuvun. But until you do, you come in here, you check the stock, you report back to me.”

“Zuvun’s not going to have any time to meet with me!” the Bajoran protests, putting his hands on his hips. “I’ve barely seen him since the start of the season.”

“Not my problem,” Zevat says. Then, her sharp eyes fall on Naprem and she frowns.

“Hey,” Zevat calls across the floor, and the Bajoran man starts, whirling around. “Tora. You’re not allowed in here right now.”

Naprem tries to bite down on her shock and disappointment, even as the other guards turn to look at her. “I just came in to get out of the cold,” she says, putting her hands up to show she means no harm.

“I don’t care,” Zevat says, though not unkindly. She jerks her chin at the door. “Head out.”

Naprem pushes off from the pillar with reluctance, mostly because the nearest guard looks like he might be about to escort her out if she doesn’t follow orders. On her way out into the wind, she chances a look over her shoulder at the other Bajoran. He’s staring at her with such fear and distaste that it feels like an insult. Before she’s completely out of earshot, he turns to Zevat, voice sharp and accusing.

“You said you’d keep those people out while I was working,” he says. “She could’ve killed me!”

“You sound pretty alive to me,” Zevat says, and then Naprem’s outside, and the rest of their conversation is swallowed by the duet of the wind whipping the waves.

* * *

She might have forgotten about the incident entirely if not for the profound strangeness of it. She’s not sure who to mention it to – it seems like a secret, somehow, something delicate she ought to be careful about.

Three days later, after the siren for work’s end has sounded, Naprem’s standing in line at the turnstiles, waiting to have her gloves removed, when a commotion begins to build out in the courtyard. There’s a chorus of shouting and yelling, and the workers close to the doors hurry out – people are pushing and shoving, craning to see over one another. Naprem gets her gloves off and then is shoved past the kiosk by an overeager neighbor. People crowd through the door, peering out into the night.

The Cardassians are shouting orders, but Naprem can’t make them out. The crowd is like a tide, sweeping her almost off her feet and out into the courtyard where the night is winter-cold and thick with salt and shouting.

Uru finds her first and pulls her by the hand to where Onea is, almost at the front of the congregation. The Cardassians are holding the crowd back – the whole camp seems to be gathered around to witness the procession of a small group that moves through the center of the camp towards the security checkpoint, and for one terrifying moment, Naprem’s sure she’s about to witness something horrible. She’s back in Rize, crowded together to watch Tirek victimize all of them in the body of one of them.

But as she gets a better view, pressing close to the front of the crowd, she sees that the Bajoran in the center of the group moving through the camp is cowering, not away from the Cardassian guards, but _behind_ them. The workers are shouting and hissing, spitting at him.

“Step back,” Naprem hears the Cardassians saying. “Step back!”

Onea draws her close, and Naprem sees Suga in the crowd with Pama and Taya.

“Professor Suga!” she calls, barely able to hear herself over the noise, but he spots her, miraculously, and pushes through the crowd to join her.

“What’s going on?” she asks. “Who is that?”

Suga calls back to her, shouting to make himself heard. “ _That_ , my dear, is scum!”

Pama leans forward, past one of the Cardassian guards restraining the crowd, and spits. “Traitor!” she yells. “Collaborator!”

The Bajoran shrinks more behind his Cardassian entourage, who hurry him past the crowds, into the security checkpoint. Naprem can’t make out any of him in the dark, except to see his fear. After the commotion dies down and the Cardassians succeed in herding them indoors, Naprem finds it impossible to ignore the venomous indignance that’s all but steaming off the workers.

“It’s been a while,” she hears Taya murmur to Suga, through the hum of the crowd.

“And here I’d hoped he’d had the decency to kill himself,” Pama says.

“My dear,” Suga says, putting his hand on the small of Pama’s back. “Collaborators are utterly bereft of decency. You know that.”

Long after lights out, Naprem can still feel that word vibrating inside of her, like a tuning fork that’s been struck. There’s something about it – about the way Suga said it, as though he were invoking some sort of deep, ancient evil. The way his mouth curled hatefully around it, as if it were a word that had personally wronged him. She’s awake for a long time thinking about it.

* * *

“What do you suppose that was all about last night?” Naprem asks Onea the next morning, passing her a fish.

“Oh, look at that!” Onea exclaims, nudging Uru with her elbow. “She’s come back to us. At long last.” She takes the fish, flicks its last remaining scale from its side, and passes it along. “The Prophets have returned her to us, alive and unharmed. Praise be.”

Uru shakes her head a little, mouth knotted with concern. “You’re still thinking about all that?” she says to Naprem.

Naprem takes the next fish from her neighbor and hands it over. It flips its tail feebly, still fighting in a way that makes her nauseous. Onea takes it from her more quickly than usual, like she knows what she’s thinking. “I heard Professor Suga say something about it afterwards – it just stuck with me.”

“Well, a riot will do that,” Onea says, carefully stripping the fish’s underbelly.

“It wasn’t a riot,” Uru chides.

“Only by a slim margin,” Onea says. “Those people acted like they wanted to tear that poor man apart.”

“I know,” Naprem says, trying not to imagine it. “The things Pama and Professor Suga were saying… I just can’t understand it. He was Bajoran, wasn’t he?”

“As far as I could see,” Onea says.

Naprem shakes her head, taking the next fish. “Professor Suga called him a ‘Collaborator.’ Do you have any idea what he could’ve meant by that?”

“A ‘Collaborator’?” Uru asks. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“What I want to know is where they found four Cardassians just to follow him around,” Onea says. “I’d never even met the ones we saw last night.”

“You think they’re with him all the time?” Naprem asks.

“Must be,” Onea says. “I’d know them otherwise. See?” she adds, giving Naprem a snide look. “Meddling has its uses.”

“I never said it didn’t,” Naprem says, leaning into her, trying to keep herself focused and grounded in the present. She tries to be mindful, to focus on tactile sensations: Onea’s warm arm pressed to hers, cold, slippery fish in her hands, the air around them always five degrees too cold. The whole factory smells of fish and blood and sea salt, wet with the taste of the sea. She tries to focus on all that, instead of letting Suga’s words loop another few times in her brain.

“You don’t suppose he was some sort of criminal?” Uru asks.

“I don’t know,” Naprem says. “I couldn’t tell.”

“Well, maybe you ought to ask Professor Suga,” Onea says, waggling her eyebrows with suggestion.

Naprem still doesn’t like the way she says it – as if asking Suga about his hatred towards a stranger could possibly be construed as courtship – but she nods nonetheless.

“Maybe I should,” she agrees.

* * *

Again, she holds her questions in her mouth like pocket change, all through the rest of their workday, and through their midday meal. This time, she’s sure who she wants to mention it to – she’s equally sure about who she doesn’t. She’s never seen Pama’s pretty face so ugly as it was last night, twisted and bent like metal around her contempt. She has no desire to see it look that way again.

She holds onto them all through the day, and past the sunset. She holds onto them even after she and Suga begin their nightly stroll around the courtyard, until they’ve walked out past most of the other groups clustered near the barracks, and are standing along the top of the cliff face, looking out over the ocean.

She starts as calmly and careful as she can, even though curiosity is burning along the back of her teeth like a brand. “Professor Suga,” she says. “Would you mind if I asked you a question?”

Suga laughs, surprised. “You’re asking permission now?”

“Should I have, before?”

“Prophets, no,” Suga laughs. “Please.”

“I wanted to ask you about the nature of what transpired yesterday. If it’s not too much.”

“Is _that_ what you’ve been thinking about all this time?” Suga asks, still smiling.

Naprem flushes involuntarily. “Is it that obvious?” she asks.

“You simply think very loudly, my dear. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Suga tips his head a little and runs his eyes over her in a detached sort of way. “Is it eating at you that much?”

“I just want to understand it,” Naprem says. “Surely you can understand _that_ particular compulsion.”

Suga smiles again and ducks his head. “So I can,” he agrees. “I must tell you – it’s all a bit unpleasant. This Occupation has made people behave in ways I can’t claim to understand.”

“I know what you mean,” Naprem says, folding her hands behind her back and watching the way the moonlight sparkles in the surf. Suga watches her, as though he’s trying to read her thoughts, but she’s not thinking about anything in particular –  simply about the absurdity of their circumstances.

“The man you saw last night,” Suga says, “goes by the name Ovig Yaien – a _Mi’tino._ He and his family have owned this factory for generations.” Suga shifts, sliding his hands into his pockets and pursing his lips. “When the Occupational government signed it over for operation by the Cardassians, Ovig and his brother signed over all the workers and their families in return for preferential treatment.”

“Preferential treatment?” Naprem asks. She has difficulty even conceptualizing of such a thing – the act itself (sacrificing one’s own people for the sake of…what? Favors?) and the pursuant goal. ‘ _Preferential treatment_ ’? “What does that… _entail_ , precisely?”

“Well,” Suga says, with a sneer, “for one thing, it means going home to their wives every evening. Living in a house; sleeping in a bed, rather than on the floor, like some sort of _animal._ Eating five full meals a day – food with flavor and color. Living free, as men rather than as slaves.”

“The Cardassians allow that?” Naprem asks, trying to disguise her shock.

“Why shouldn’t they? It’s the brothers Ovig who’ve guaranteed their steady supply of workers; it’s the brothers Ovig who take stock of their product and verify its quality; it’s the brothers Ovig who've presented them this entire operation on a silver platter.” Suga nearly spits with disgust. “All of _us_. Docile, law-abiding workers with no power to act against them – nothing like those convicts you were living with down south.”

“We weren’t _convicts_ , Ede,” Naprem says, invoking his personal name to make sure he understands how he’s hurt her. Instantly, she sees recognition and regret in his face, hard to make out through the dark.

“I apologize,” he says, immediately. “It wasn’t my intention to—”

“I know,” Naprem says, firmly, and he swallows his words to take his lumps with dignity. “But you did. We weren’t criminals, Ede. We’d done nothing wrong but ask for more than the Occupational government was willing to provide.”

“You’re right,” Suga says, with full repentance. “I apologize. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s a mistake I’ll labor to avoid repeating.”

They’re quiet for a while, then, Naprem aching, insides churning like blood under a new bruise. The wind pushes at her chest and the cold pulls at the thin skin of her lips. Suga stands beside her, careful and quiet.

“The people here are… insular,” he says, finally. “They’re accustomed to a certain way of life. Once upon a time, that was what drove me away from this place. But I suppose there’s still a part of me that identifies with it.”

“This is where you come from,” Naprem says. “There’s nothing unnatural about that.”

“But there’s something cruel about it, isn’t there?” Suga watches her, brow creased. “That narrow-mindedness – it’s forced you to the outskirts.”

“You’re trying to defend yourselves,” Naprem says, keeping her tone neutral, and the cold seems to have sunk into her chest. “If what you’ve said about the Ovig family is true, it’s no wonder you’re struggling to identify who the enemy is.”

“You _do_ understand,” Suga sighs, seeming relieved. ”It’s abominable, you know – having to be suspicious of your own countrymen.”

“I can’t believe anyone could do such a thing to their own people.”

“The Occupational government does it every day,” Suga says.

“No,” Naprem says, shaking her head. “It’s different. It’s evil, certainly. But they don’t sign away the lives of anyone they’re beholden to. We’re not real to them – we’re numbers. Statistics. An expendable resource, like iridium, or fish. No,” she says, “I’m talking about… They were the owners of this factory. They must’ve known the workers personally; their names, their families, the details of their lives. That’s different. I mean, can you imagine? Can you _imagine_ – what if someone had come to us and asked us to give up our colleagues? Our _students_? Could you ever have betrayed them, knowing what they’d face? Could you have lived with yourself after that?”

“My dear,” Suga says, with no small amount of sympathy, “I admire the things you find unthinkable. I think it would shock you, the sort of things most people are capable of in the face of adversity.”

“But are _you_ capable of those sorts of things?” Naprem asks, more aggressively than she means to.

“No,” he says, serious face composed and sincere, holding her gaze, and instantly she feels the small flame of outrage in her chest go out. “I’d defend Bajor to the death. I think you know that.”

Naprem studies his face a moment, then she nods, swallowing her uneasiness, letting Suga’s reassurance wash over her. She feels steadied by his words.

“I do,” she says.

Suga nods, turning his head to regard the ocean through the dark.

“The people here can be…suspicious,” he says. “But they just want their freedom, the same as you or I.”

Naprem nods. “So they abuse those they deem responsible for their loss of it,” she concludes.

“It’s hardly _abuse_ ,” Suga scoffs. “We curse them and spit at their feet, on occasion. Nothing more sizeable than that – their _Cardassian entourage_ won’t allow for it.”

“There must be more constructive ways to fight back,” Naprem says.

From across the courtyard, Naprem hears the light’s out siren pierce the night, echoing through the camp. But Suga’s looking at her like she’s just invoked some sort of arcane magic, like she’s just produced a key from under her tongue.

“You two,” one of the Cardassian guards calls from further up the bluff. “Report to your barracks. Now.”

Suga turns to obey almost before she does – she follows him back up the way, heading for the barracks. Once they’ve passed the guard, he motions for her to walk closer to him.

“Come find me tonight after light’s out,” he tells her. “We’ll talk.”

Naprem wonders if they didn’t just, but he heads up the stairs ahead of her, more quickly than she can keep up with, and she lets him.

 


	2. Small Victories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Together with Suga's students, Naprem remembers her love of protest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT 02/13/2018: I've begun to go through and add art to my fics to help y'all with the visual components for all these original characters I've got running around, so help yourselves to a Zevat! I'll be including fan art I've gotten from other lovely folks, too... and if you've done any art, let me tell you, I would kill a man to see it. 

** **

_Glinn Zevat by shevathegun_

* * *

 

**Zarpek Fishery, Yynys, Bajor – Winter, 2329**

* * *

 

Finding Suga after light’s out is far easier said than done, as it turns out. She has to wait almost a half an hour for the guards to finish their rounds in the dark; when they finally take their place at the ends of the room, their backs to the beds, she has to slip away from her aunts.

She’s not sure if she’s supposed to keep it a secret; Suga acted as though it was. She also doesn’t have time or information enough to explain. So she tells them she’s going to the lavatory.

“Now?” Uru whispers.

“Just hold it,” Onea murmurs, not even opening her eyes.

“I’m afraid it’s urgent,” Naprem whispers.

Uru pats Onea’s arm to get her up, and Onea groans and grumbles. It’s an uncomfortable process, detangling them from where their old, thin limbs are knotted around her. They find a way to jab every one of their bony angles into her stomach and her legs, and by the time she gets free, she can feel a constellation of new elbow and knee-shaped bruises blooming along her ribs. She guides them back together in the dark, and they fold around each other the way she imagines they must have in their youth.

“Hurry back,” Uru whispers.

“I’ll do my best,” Naprem says, squeezing her hand.

She crawls out into the dark, narrowly avoiding her neighbors, feeling like a ship lost in a storm. She slips carefully past the barrier walls and into the empty center aisle, and then crawls across it to the opposite side. She knows where Suga sleeps, sort of, but it’s difficult to navigate in the dark, when everything looks different, and when she’s trying to avoid drawing anyone’s attention.

She’s peering around the bunks, trying to discern him from a thousand other prone, sleeping bodies, when a tap on the shoulder nearly spooks her out of her skin. She whips her head around, heart pounding, to find Taya staring back at her, wide eyes luminescent in the dark.

“You’re going to meet with Professor Suga, aren’t you?”

Naprem flounders, struggling to quiet her pounding heart. “Yes,” she whispers.

Taya nods, then motions for her to follow. Naprem scuttles along behind her, struggling to keep up as she ducks in through a small gap in the unfamiliar rows of sleeping bodies, and makes her way towards a landmark Naprem can’t make out through the shadows. Through several rows of sleepers, huddled behind one of the beds near the windows, Suga is sitting, surrounded by his students, Pama to his right, her voluminous curls catching the moonlight streaming through the frosted windows like thin spindles of silver.

“Professor Tora,” Suga whispers, and she can hardly make him out, but she hears the smile at the edge of his words. “Good evening.”

“Good evening,” she says, still a little unsteady from the fright Taya gave her, still uneasy. She struggles to figure out where to sit in the dark – she can’t make the other students out, but for their eyes and the vague, black shapes of their bodies. There’s hardly any light to see by. She shuffles awkwardly into the circle, trying not to take up too much space.

“That’s everyone,” Taya says, softly.

“Good,” Suga says, keeping his voice so low that even Naprem must strain to hear him. “Then we’ll begin. I’ve brought Professor Tora hear tonight to talk about organized resistance. You know a bit about that, don’t you, Professor?”

“Well,” she whispers, “I don’t know about that. It’s only my life’s work.”

Suga audibly chokes down a laugh.

“You’re angry with me,” he says, a little breathless from holding back his laughter.

“I’m not—” She exhales a short, terse sigh, unable to feign comfort. “I just—I’m a little unnerved. That’s all.”

“You’re among friends,” Suga assures her. “You know everyone here.”

“I can’t see anyone here,” she says.

“Cardassians are deaf as stone, but they’ve got sharp eyes,” Pama whispers. “Light and motion sensitive. We have to conduct ourselves this way.”

“I understand,” Naprem says, a little annoyed.

“I scared her,” Taya whispers, unsolicited.

“Did you?” Suga whispers back, still laughing.

“No!” Naprem hisses. “Not—scared, exactly—it’s dark, I was surprised, that’s all, stop laughing at me!” Because his laugh is contagious, and it’s making her grin despite the tight coil of unease still twisting in her chest. “You’re going to make me laugh, and then we really will be done for.”

“Alright,” Suga says. “Taya, my dear, apologize won’t you?”

Taya looks directly at Naprem, huge eyes owlish and unblinking. “Sorry,” she says, in her strange, prim voice.

“It’s alright,” Naprem says, flushing a little with embarrassment. “Please just tell me what this all about.”

“For the last few months,” Pama tells her, “we’ve been meeting once a week to discuss the possibility of fighting back.”

“It’s nothing formal,” Suga says. “Just a private gathering of like-minded people. It isn’t really safe to discuss such things in the yard.”

“I’m not certain it’s safe to discuss them here ,” Naprem whispers, looking around at the dark lumps strewn about that denote their neighbors.

“It’s safe,” Taya says.

“Not to worry,” Suga says. “Our fellows are discreet, discerning folks. And those who aren’t are sound sleepers.”

Naprem isn’t sure what to make of that – for an instant, she feels taken out of time, back to the moment they shot the anarchist back in Rize. For a strange, solitary instant, she smells the sizzle of a phaser vaporizing flesh.

She can’t bring herself to say anything one way or the other. Suga seems to sense her hesitance.

“Earlier,” he murmurs, “you said you thought there must be more constructive ways of fighting for our emancipation. Did you mean it?”

“Yes,” she says, unable to stop herself.

“Well,” he says, “then, I propose we discuss them. If you can spare the time.”

* * *

 

As she might have expected, Suga and his students bring a sharp, cutting intelligence to every aspect of the discussion of possible resistance. They’re all students of the “hard” sciences – chemists and physicists and engineers and mathematicians, zealous worshipers in the House of Logic. For every problem, they have concise, absolute solutions. And, as she also might have expected, for everything that cannot be solved this way, they have nothing but the most utter contempt. In the face of subjective, malleable objects – like, for example, complex sentient beings and the complex conflicts and interactions thereof – they devolve into petulant children, extremists with even less ability to rhyme than they have to reason.

“We should riot,” Pama whispers, fist clenched with passion. “Take we want by force. There’s many more of us than there are of them, they’d be powerless!”

“Even a Cardassian with no phaser, no friends, and no teeth isn’t powerless,” Naprem argues. “We’re not talking about taking on other civilians. These are well-armed, well-trained soldiers – some of the best in the galaxy. And even if we did overwhelm them, then what? Reinforcements would be here in a matter of hours.”

“Then we die fighting,” Pama says, and Naprem remembers now why her brother occupies such a conspicuous place in her memory. It wasn’t simply that Pama Niman understood civilian uprisings; it was that he constantly acted like he wanted to lead one. Like he thought of Naprem’s class as a crash course, a key to a much greater adventure he wanted to take part in. Pama Wysa has that fire too – that naïve, romantic-but-absurd idea of what it is to fight and die for something you believe in. It’s giving Naprem a headache.

“Violence is a non-option,” she tells the group. “In a contest of physical strength, we’re never going to win.”

“Not with that attitude, we aren’t,” Pama grouses.

“Listen,” Naprem says, insistently. “So far, we’ve been forced to play this game by Cardassian rules.”

“So we change the rules!” says Pama.

“No,” Naprem says. “We change the game.”

“ How ?” Suga asks, eagerly, as though he’s expecting some sort of miracle.

“Well,” she says, “what do the Cardassians want? What’s their goal? What’s their objective?”

She can see – even through the dark – that it’s the very first time any one of them have thought about this. They look at one another as though they’re expecting to find the answers on someone else’s data PADD.

“Food,” Taya says, studiously.

“Dominion over us,” Pama says, though she doesn’t seem completely sure.

“Resources?” asks another woman in the group.

“Everything we have,” says her neighbor.

“I propose that it’s all of the above,” Suga says.

“I agree with you,” Naprem says.

“So what?” Pama asks, but she has Suga’s same eagerness now, like she thinks this is some sort of intellectual exercise, where at the end Naprem is going to tell her the right answer. “What now?”

“So,” Naprem says, trying not to let her voice betray her building anxiety. “We have to figure out how to limit their access to those things. Or somehow change the way in which we provide it to them. Having what someone else wants gives you power over them. It allows you to set the terms of engagement.”

“But can’t they just take what they want?” one of the women asks. “They have phasers. And numbers. And they’re strong, like you said.”

“Well, we’ll have to account for what we have,” Naprem says. “And figure out how to leverage it to get what we want.”

A confused silence falls over the group. Taya blinks and looks at the floor, clearly thinking. Pama folds her arms, looking at Suga. But Suga’s watching Naprem from his side of the group, eyes glittering with excitement.

“They can’t conduct any part of this operation without our cooperation,” he says.

Naprem nods. “That’s true.”

“So we stop cooperating,” he says. “We refuse to work for them.”

“They’ll force us,” Taya says.

“They’ll try,” Naprem says. “So we have to establish what we want. Something proportional to the effort we’re willing to expend to get it.”

“How’s that different from rioting?” Pama says, a little snide.

“Because rioting ends with us being executed,” Naprem says, frowning.

“They’ve never executed anyone,” Taya says.

‘Not here they haven’t,’ Naprem doesn’t say.

“So let’s not tempt them,” she says instead. “We should start small. Small acts of disobedience we agree to do away with in exchange for an equally small concession on their part.”

“Why start small?” one of the women asks. “Why not make a list of demands and refuse to work until they fulfill them?”

“Because we haven’t established any history of protest with them. They’d have no reason to take us seriously – no reason to believe that satisfying our demands would restore order. We need to start small so they won’t get overenthusiastic. We keep our demands small and, by their perception, reasonable, and we’re more likely to succeed. We’re also more likely to attract other people to our cause. If we’re going to effect change, we’re going to need to recruit the help of as many people as we can, and we’re only going to be able to do that if we can prove that our methods can work.”

“So what are we supposed to ask for?” Pama says.

“A morning meal,” one woman suggests.

“An evening meal!” suggests another.

“More bedrolls,” another says.

“No!” says another, “Additional toiletries!”

“I want to be allowed pray out loud,” says yet another.

“No more supervised trips to the lavatories,” Pama says.

“An hour later to sleep,” says Suga.

“Coats,” Taya says, simply.

They all turn to her at once. She blinks back at them, slowly.

“It’s cold,” Taya says. “I’d like a coat.”

A few of the other women begin to nod.

“Yes,” says one. “Thicker tunics. Winter clothes. And socks!”

“Yes!” says another, so loud they have to shush her. “Yes,” she hisses, trying to whisper. “It’s so cold outside. They could give us coats, couldn’t they? I know I’d work faster with a coat.”

Naprem nods slowly, with building excitement. “They might sympathize with that,” she says. “They don’t like the cold, either.”

“So how do we get coats?” Pama asks.

“Well, we’ll have to prove we need them,” Naprem says, head whirling with thought. “That not having them is reducing our productivity.”

“How?” one of the women asks.

“By reducing our productivity,” Suga says, understanding, and Naprem can’t help but smile at him through the dark, feeling strong and full of energy for the first time since Tirek cut a tally of her disobedience into her face. In the dark of the night, she feels incandescent, and once they’ve discussed the details of their plan, she hurries back to her bedroll with her blood buzzing with electricity and excitement.

“Where’ve you been?” Uru whispers as she presses back in between them. “You’ve been gone for almost an hour and a half. You’re not making trouble, are you?”

“Me?” Naprem whispers back, grin stretching across her face. “Never, Auntie.”

Uru sucks her teeth, tutting. “You always call me ‘Auntie’ when you’re making mischief. You know that, don’t you? You’ve done it ever since you were tiny.”

“No I haven’t!”

“You have. And you are.”

“I’m not,” Naprem whispers, but she’s almost giggling with exhilaration.

Onea snorts in her sleep and squeezes her tight. Uru sighs long-sufferingly and takes her hand.

“I suppose if it makes you smile like that,” Uru says, so softly Naprem can hardly hear her.

Naprem squeezes her hand and kisses the top of her head. Uru smells like fish and wildflowers, like dirt and just a hint of the lilac perfume she used to wear every day, as though the scent has soaked into her skin.

“I love you, Auntie.”

“I love you too, child.” And then, after a moment: “Be careful.”

“I will, Auntie.”

“You won’t,” Uru sighs. “But I love you anyway. Prophets preserve me.”

* * *

 

The plan goes into effect first thing in the morning, and demands only the slightest over-exaggeration of the facts. Naprem goes to work as normal – heading through the turnstiles, putting on her gloves at the cleaning station, taking her place beside the conveyor belt. She’s perfectly well-mannered. But, this morning, rather than bracing against the cold that sweeps in off the sea, chilling her through her clothes, she surrenders to it, shivering between her aunts.

“Are you alright?” Uru asks, passing a naked fish up the line.

“I’m fine,” Naprem says, faking a brave face.

“She’s freezing,” Onea says, leaning into Naprem’s arm to take her temperature.

“We all are,” grouses Naprem’s neighbor.

“I’m fine,” Naprem insists. “Really.”

Onea shakes her head disapprovingly and makes her sit in the sun during their midday meal.

* * *

 

Naprem keeps up her shivering the whole week long. It isn’t particularly difficult, though it is exhausting – by lights out, her whole body aches. Her aunts fret over her all the while, snuggling especially close when they sleep to keep her warm.

“It’s this coastal climate,” Onea grumbles one morning during roll call. She rubs her hands together furiously, then holds them to the sides of Naprem’s nose, against her nasal ridges. “You’re a flower of the East. You’re not built for cold like this.”

“Auntie,” Naprem says, her voice nasally and stuffed-up sounding from Onea’s fingers on her nose. “I’m alright. I promise.”

But when they’re in the factory that day, she makes a point to let her teeth chatter when the wind surges in through the open shutters. The worker across from her shakes her head, giving her a sympathetic look.

“It just keeps getting colder, eh?” she asks.

“It really does,” Naprem says. She can’t recall any one of the strangers at the camp speaking to her so easily before. It’s nearly exciting enough for her to drop the act, but she’s not an expert for nothing. She keeps shivering the whole day through.

* * *

 

In the second week, she begins to cultivate a bit of a cough. She’s sly about it, hiding it at first, doing it only a little before bed, before the start of their shift, after their morning meal. But after a few days, she brings it to work with her, starting up at what she hopes are random enough intervals to be convincing.

Onea’s getting progressively more and more irritated on her behalf – she pokes and prods her before bed, checking her throat and listening to her chest.

“It’s just the cold, Auntie,” Naprem tells her. “I get cold and it feels like my throat closes up.”

Onea shakes her head. “It’s probably seasonal asthma,” she says. “If we could keep you warm, we’d be able to get rid of it.”

“Maybe we should talk to someone,” Uru frets.

“Like who?” Onea gripes. “I don’t think I’ve seen a doctor since we got here.”

Onea and Uru aren’t the only ones worried, either. All along the factory lines and throughout the courtyard, Naprem hears resentful murmuring about how cold it is. Everyone has an anecdote about one of their shivering coworkers, and, Naprem’s noticed, her pronounced shivering seems to be catching. She’s noticed more than a few of her coworkers – not in on the plan – shivering and fighting to stay warm, blowing on their hands, rubbing their hands and holding them to their noses. In Suga’s group, everyone keeps up the act, until Onea and Uru join in too, subconsciously holding themselves tighter, clustering in close together.

“It’s so cold,” Pama moans one day, in a tone Naprem thinks is a little too dramatic, but which her aunts don’t seem to find suspicious at all.

“Prophets,” Uru says. “If they’d just give us…blankets, or something.”

“Coats,” Taya suggests, innocently.

“Coats!” Onea crows. “There’s an idea.”

Naprem hides her giddy grin behind her hands, blowing into them. Suga catches her at it and hides his too, and Naprem laughs a little, feeling puckish and powerful.

* * *

 

She waits until the third week to begin the slowdown. All this, they orchestrate as a group, as quietly and covertly as possible. They stutter it, carefully, making sure to make it seem as independent and involuntary as possible.

Naprem starts her slowdown with small acts of fumbling. She coughs and loses a fish – shivers so hard she can’t pass one up the line – struggles to perform as visibly as possible. She keeps her face pained, as though she’s frustrated with herself, and her neighbors are sympathetic and coaxing for the first time since she arrived. Before midday meal on the first day, she’s lost no less than ten fish this way, and no one has batted an eye.

Zevat appears behind her on the second day, just as Naprem deliberately lets a fish slip through her fingers and onto the floor.

“What’s going on?” Zevat asks, in her gruff, blunt way. Naprem makes it a point to flounder, trembling with exaggerated chill. “Tora. What’s wrong with you.”

“She’s freezing is what’s wrong!” Onea says. “It’s so cold she can’t feel her fingers!”

Zevat raises an eyebrow, then looks over at Naprem, scrutinizing her.

“I thought you all were warm-blooded,” she says.

“Warm-blooded,” Naprem says, weakly, letting her teeth chatter. “Not immune to cold.”

“Huh,” Zevat says, and Naprem almost laughs aloud at the face she makes; like she’s both annoyed and intrigued. “Well, warm up then.”

“And how is she supposed to do that?” Uru asks, glaring at her. “This whole factory is an ice box!”

Zevat rolls her eyes a little and jerks her chin, indicating that Naprem should follow. Naprem gives her aunts an apologetic look and hurries after her, past the rows of machines, to wall. Zevat walks a ways to stand beneath a large, orange light fixture – a heat lamp, Naprem realizes, as she steps into its sunset-colored glow. It’s heavenly under its lamplight; warmth blooms instantly through her entire body, and she gets an electric, swooping chill, gasping a little, hugging herself. Zevat takes up her post again along the wall, watching her.

“Better?” Zevat asks.

“I will be,” Naprem says, rubbing her arms. She can’t believe what a difference it makes, standing under the heat lamps. “Thank you.”

Zevat shakes her head, shrugging with her thin lips. “You were being disruptive. Don’t thank me.”

“This is punishment, then?”

“Punishment won’t fix your problem, will it?”

“Warmer clothes might.”

Zevat swivels her head around to look at her, folding her arms slowly. Naprem deliberately meets her eyes, then directs her gaze downward without turning her head, folding her arms behind her back; an innocent suggestion, she says with her body, not a challenge.

“Explain how,” Zevat says, finally.

“Well,” Naprem says carefully, “it’s just that the fabric of my clothing is very thin, which makes it difficult for me to maintain my core body temperature when it’s cold like this. If the fabric was thicker… or if we had some sort of secondary layer of clothing, like… coats, for example. Then, you wouldn’t have so many problems. Look,” she says, carefully gesturing out at the line at a pair of women who are shaking so hard it’s rattling the whole line. “It’s not just me. The cold’s really affecting our productivity.”

“Huh,” Zevat says, leaning back against the wall, a thoughtful look on her face.

“I understand why it’s not practical to have these sorts of heaters near the line. It would soil the fish, wouldn’t it?”

Zevat shrugs. “No idea. Just figured you didn’t need ‘em.”

Naprem tries to disguise her surprised laugh as a cough. Zevat wrinkles her nose, drawing back from her, tail curling in with what must be disgust.

“You sick?” she asks, as though dreading the answer.

“No,” Naprem says. “Just cold.”

“Good,” she says, frowning. “Get going, then. Back to work.”

Naprem goes, obediently, stepping out from under the lamp’s warm glow. The cold outside Zevat’s little bubble of heaven is a slap in the face, a bludgeon, like being dunked in ice water. She gasps involuntarily, clutching herself. There’s steam billowing off her shoulders, and the cold penetrates her so deep and so suddenly that for a second she feels certain her heart will stop.

“Prophets,” she gasps, holding herself as she forces herself to walk back to her aunts and take her place in line. “Prophet’s breath…”

“That good, eh?” the woman across from her asks.

“I think my brain just froze,” Naprem says, a little breathless.

“Just two hours,” Onea assures her. “Two hours and we can get you some sun. Just hang on.”

“I’m alright,” Naprem shudders. “I’m alright.”

When they’re finally released for midday meal two hours later, Naprem finds Zevat watching her as she leaves. She holds her gaze for a moment, surprised. Then, she drops her eyes and tucks her hands, newly bare, under her arms and hurries out, looking for gaps in the clouds.

At the end of the week, a guard tosses three small disposable cases on her bed just before lights out.

“What’s this?” she calls after him.

“Coats,” he says, as though he’s answered the same question two hundred times already.

“Coats!” Onea exclaims, grabbing her by the shoulders.

Coats, Naprem thinks, joyously, taking hers out of the packaging and modeling it for Uru and Onea. She feels eyes on her, and she looks up, expecting to find Suga, but instead it’s Zevat again, staring at Naprem from her post near the door, arms folded, tip of her tail flicking slowly. Naprem beams at her and does a little twirl in the coat, letting its thick gray tails flare out. Zevat shakes her head and looks away, but her whole tail’s swinging with something she clearly refuses to wear on her face. Naprem retreats back to her aunts, feeling utterly victorious.

* * *

 

“I can’t believe it worked!” Pama hisses in the dark.

“These’re good quality,” one of the other woman says, with an air of authority. “Thick, too. Easy to keep clean.”

“A bit plain,” says another, holding hers up in front of her, “but I suppose it’s better than nothing.”

“This is just the beginning,” Suga says, barely restraining his enthusiasm. “Now, we’ve got a win under our belt – they know they have to take us seriously.”

“Can we ask for more food next?” asks one of the women.

“I want more bedrolls first!” exclaims another.

“Now, hold on a minute,” Naprem says, putting her hand out before the group can get too excited. “We can’t ask for anything else just yet.”

“What?” Pama whispers. “Why not?”

“Well, we got what we were asking for. Now we have to hold up our end of the bargain.”

“ What bargain?” Pama asks, and Naprem can feel the whole group turn to look at her accusatorily. She braces herself, pursing her lips.

“We told the Cardassians that warmer clothes would increase our productivity,” she says. “So… now, unpleasant though it may be, we have to prove that meeting our demands works. We got our coats. Now… we have to increase productivity. At least for a while.”

“How long is ‘a while’?” Suga asks, with audible disappointment.

“Until the end of the month, at least. Just until we can establish a rapport,” she adds, sensing the disquieted shifting of the group from her, the dab of bittersweetness souring their taste of victory. “Listen. I know it isn’t fun. But this is the reality of protest in captivity. Out in the real world, you can push and push and push. You’re usually fighting against systemic entities that won’t respond to appeasement and will respond to relentlessness. But in captivity there has to be more give and take. Your oppressors are always in the room with you. They know where you sleep; they have power over every aspect of your lives. So victories come with caveats. And this is one of them. We have to carry through on our promises.”

“So we stop the slow down,” Suga says, clearly reluctant.

“Just for a while,” Naprem assures them.

“I suppose that makes sense,” one of the women says.

“We promised,” Taya nods.

* * *

 

It isn’t particularly glamorous, Naprem can admit that – going back to the factory and resisting the urge to keep up the act is harder than she expected. She’s used to much more sizeable victories than this. But at least she is warmer. The coats do their jobs excellently. All through work her hands remain icy to the touch, and she can still feel the cold winter air nipping at the back of her neck, but she can keep moving without much trouble. She can see the effects on Onea and Uru, too – they move with more fluidity, more energy, and Onea, at least, is more talkative. All through the courtyard, Naprem sees these same small changes beginning to come over most of the other workers. Morale is unexpectedly high, and the air tastes sweeter again. She hears people laughing more, complaining less, and so she does away with her fish-dropping completely. A few days after the distribution of the coats, she even flicks a few scales loose from the skin of one of them.

“That’s it,” Onea says, proudly, as though she’s been waiting for it all along.

* * *

 

It’s towards the tail of winter – about seven weeks of good behavior – before Suga begins to chafe. Naprem’s actually quite impressed with him; he’s never been the most patient person, but he seems wooed by their initial success, and so he’s clearly determined to let her set their agenda for now.  

But by seven weeks in, he’s clearly beginning to itch. “It’s simply a matter of determining what’s next,” he says to her on more than one occasion, trying to play nonchalant. “The logical next step, if you will.”

It isn’t as if Naprem doesn’t share his growing impatience – she does, naturally. But it’s already clear to her that another slowdown won’t have the same effect. Zevat and her underlings are much more vigilant now, monitoring worker activity in the factories with a shark-like intensity. If it’s going to be something to do with productivity levels, it’s going to have to be conducted somehow else.

Everyone has some idea about what this new method could be: Pama wants a worker strike, but it’s far too early and they have far too few supporters; Eri, one of the other women in the group, wants to cause some sort of incident using only fish blood, which is artistic but, even in its early phases, clumsy and inarticulate; Jozke, yet another, wants to trick one of the overseers into doing her job which, while entertaining to think about, doesn’t seem conducive to achieving much of anything outside catharsis. Despite her early eureka moment, Taya simply watches the proceedings with almost no commentary whatsoever.

It’s Suga himself who finally suggests something feasible, almost without meaning to.

“You’d think,” he says, frustrated, “that with how damn crowded the factories are, we might be able to recruit a few more people to our cause.”

“Yes,” Naprem nods, and a lamp is lit in the back of her mind, lengthening the shadows her thoughts cast. “Yes, you would.”

* * *

 

After all, space – as they all know – is a precious commodity in Zarpek. People don’t take kindly to having what little they have intruded upon by others, accidentally or otherwise. Together, they determine who has the most sensitive neighbors. And then, they set out to make nuisances of themselves. They trip, and slip, and nudge, and crowd, until by the end of the second week, no less than three fights have broken out – two in the factories, and one in the yard. Eri turns up to one of their meetings with a split lip and brilliant smile, and a story about how she earned it by leaning in too close to another person’s conversation. The camp comes alive with murmuring and bickering. People stare around suspiciously during roll call, shaking their heads.

“There’s just not nearly enough space,” Naprem makes sure to say to Onea one day as they reach the head of the line in front of the food cart. “It’s only natural that people have begun to get a bit territorial.”

She sees the guards manning the cart glance at one another. Two days later, Zevat is looking directly at her when a fight breaks out two people down the line. Two days after that, there are new orders at roll call – fifty people are moved out of each one of the factories to another factory facility that’s stood empty since Naprem arrived, and the room between everyone on the line becomes more generous.

“I’ve never been so happy to move my elbows,” Jozke says at their next meeting, grinning from ear to ear. She flaps them to demonstrate, and Naprem has to clap her hand over her mouth to smother her laughter, along with everyone else.

* * *

 

For a few months, their victories are consistent, and their methods go, for the most part, undetected. They earn a second meal each day after Taya shows them how adept she is at pretending to faint, and manages to induce a contagious wave of it through the camp. They earn more sleeping space when Pama and Eri begin spreading rumors that the lack of space is encouraging sexual deviance, which the Cardassians are strangely averse to. They earn a later roll call when Suga somehow convinces his entire regiment of cliff climbers to pretend to fall asleep while on the job. Each success brings with it a hot burst of enthusiasm, elevating morale and productivity throughout the whole camp. But each time, the Cardassians seem more put upon and annoyed, as though they can tell they’re engaged in battle of wits and losing.

Most especially, Glinn Zevat observes all of this with a keen eye, measuring Naprem’s reaction from a distance each time the workers are awarded new privileges. It’s the first week in spring when she finally pulls Naprem aside, grabbing her by the arm before she can filter outside for their midday meal. Taya and Pama have just started their newest campaign – protesting accompaniment to the lavatories by making aggressive eye contact with their Cardassian guards as they relieve themselves.

“Tora,” Zevat says, pulling her to the side. “Enough.”

“I’m sorry?” Naprem says.

“I said enough,” Zevat repeats, more forcefully. “You’re driving me crazy.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Naprem says.

“Yes, you do,” Zevat says. “Knock it off. Gul Zuvun’s pissed. We’ve given you plenty. Lay off for a bit, or I’m going to have to move you.”

Naprem’s not quite sure what to make of this conversation – Zevat’s never given her reason to doubt her word. But when she brings it to the group, they’re utterly undeterred.

“They won’t move you,” Pama scoffs. “They never move anyone in the barracks. Besides, we’re just starting to make headway!”

“A little longer,” Taya says, in her soft, prim way.

It’s only two days before she returns to the barracks at lights out to find Zevat waiting in front of her bedroll.

“Tora,” she says. “Pack up. You’re being reassigned.”

“What?” Naprem asks, feeling as though a balloon’s deflated in her chest. “Why?”

Zevat gives her a look at shoulders past. “I told you why. Pack up.”

“What’s going on?” Uru asks.

“Nothing anymore, I bet,” Zevat says in a Cardassian murmur, and Naprem’s forced to scramble to collect their things and hurry after her, face burning, and needles prickling along the inside of her chest.

* * *

 

Predictably, her aunts are furious.

“I can’t believe you,” Onea hisses as they fight to get comfortable. The fifth floor of the barracks is much warmer than the floors below, but also much more crowded. Onea and Uru are pressed back-to-back with their neighbors, their bony limbs fencing Naprem in for a heady helping of contrition.

“Lying to us like that…” Onea pinches her ear hard and she yelps. A few of the people near them roll over to glare at them. “You had me worried sick! And for what?! Things we were all doing just fine without!”

“After everything we went through at Rize,” Uru says, voice shaking a little. “I can’t believe you’d put us in danger again like that. You’re lucky she only moved us. Did you even think about what you were getting us into? Did you even try to be careful?”

“I was being careful,” Naprem whispers, and she was, but she didn’t think about what she was getting them into, not really. Zarpek is so quiet in comparison to Rize that she’d let herself forget for a moment – let herself get swept up in the energy of protest, like it was some kind of game, like the stakes of her insubordination were low.

“Not careful enough,” Uru says, coolly, and her scorn hurts.

“I can’t believe you didn’t trust us!” Onea scoffs. “We’ve always helped you before.”

“Not that we should have,” Uru mutters.

It goes back and forth like that for hours, with Naprem finding fewer and fewer ways to defend herself against it. The next morning, at roll call, they won’t even look at her. It burns worse than reassignment does.

* * *

 

Suga is equally furious, but for the opposite reason. Naprem doesn’t go to meet with him and his students during their midday meal the way she usually does – she’s paralyzed by indecision about it, but it’s clear her aunts won’t go, and the Cardassians in the yard are watching her carefully. It’s probably more suspicious not to mingle with him the way she usually does, but she can’t risk endangering him on top of everything. If Zevat’s already identified the other members of their little group – and chances are good she that has – she could easily see mingling as another infraction. So Naprem keeps her distance. Suga comes and finds her afterhours, and Naprem can tell by the crease in his upper lip that he’s angry.

“It’s preposterous,” he says, lowly, as they walk around the yard, keeping their heads down. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

“We’ve been disruptive,” Naprem says. “Cardassians don’t care for insubordination, even the quiet, non-violent kind.”

“It’s not like we’ve been leading an uprising,” Suga scoffs.

“Haven’t we?”

“Not a proper one,” he says. “And we never will at this rate – without you, we’re lost.”

Naprem flushes with a strange combination of pleasure and embarrassment, feeling both flattered and afraid. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do,” Suga says, giving her a look. He looks so much more severe lately, she thinks – handsome face worn with more lines than she remembers from his teaching days, skin thicker, flushed by the constant wind, his beard growing thicker than ever. “You’ve directed us up until now.”

“You’ve directed yourselves. I’ve been there to advise you, that’s all.”

“Don’t take so little credit,” Suga says, shaking his head a little. “You do this, you know? You belittle yourself. You erase yourself from your own life.”

“I don’t know that it’s as bad as all that.”

“Glinn Zevat knows how vital you are in all this or she never would have moved you,” Suga insists, seriously. “She’s sure you’re vital to all of this. And so am I.”

Naprem opens her mouth to speak but can’t find the words – she doesn’t know if she should thank him, or ask him to stop. She closes her mouth, swallows, and tries again: “You can go on without me. There are many protests that have succeeded without my involvement. We can make this one of them.”

“I don’t know that we can, Professor.” Suga looks out at the sea, shakes his head. “The girls are too inexperienced – they have the passion to make a change, but they don’t have any of the tools they need. Neither do I, for that matter. This is your area of expertise. We need to be able to consult you.”

“Well, you’re consulting me now,” Naprem says. “Perhaps we’ll have to settle for doing things this way for the time being.”

“You mean I bring you the details from the meetings and we discuss them out here?” Suga tuts, shakes his head again. “It’s feasible, I suppose. Hardly ideal.”

“Nothing about this situation is ideal,” Naprem reminds him.

“I suppose not,” Suga agrees.

* * *

 

With the move, Naprem’s social standing evaporates to nothing overnight. Instantly, she and her aunts are back to square one – strangers in a strange place, struggling to find space enough to simply exist. It’s even more crowded now than it was when they first arrived, and the other workers afford them no kindness. Their meals become nightmarish; no one will make space for the three of them, or invite them to sit down. They eat somewhere different every day now, sometimes standing up, crowded together. Even the workers on the line are colder to them, giving them furtive glances when they think they aren’t looking, refusing to make conversation.

A few times in the yard, Taya comes over to them and helps them find space to sit. She never says much; Naprem appreciates her company nonetheless. But there isn’t much Taya or any of Suga’s students can do. The camp seems to be under the impression that Naprem committed a grave infraction worthy of ostracization, and the mistreatment it earns her extends to her aunts; it’s Rize all over again. People scoff when Onea asks them, habitually, for their names; they avoid eye contact when Uru says “excuse me”; they glare at Naprem when she gets to the front of the line at the meal cart. It’s monumentally depressing.

It’s their sleeping accommodations that are by far the worst. Their new bunkmates on the fifth floor afford them absolutely no respect. They roll into them when they’re sleeping, step on them and over them on their way to roll call, talk loudly after light’s out even after Onea and Uru shush them. Twice, Naprem returns from her evening walk with Suga to find their bedroll relocated, with Uru and Onea huddled together on it, looking dejected. After the third time, she comes home early every night, until she finally catches one of their neighbors shoving it out into the midway.

“I don’t believe that’s yours,” she says, loudly, and they freeze, glancing over at her.

They swallow visibly, look around for support, and square their jaw. “You’re moving,” they say.

“I don’t think we are,” Naprem says, because she’s had about enough of her aunties suffering on her behalf. “Put it back, please.”

Her neighbor swallows again, pursing their lips. Another worker grabs her bedroll and shoves it away from them.

“You don’t scare us, Professor,” they sneer, and her neighbor nods, clearly enthused by their support.

“Don’t I?”

“The guards are watching,” her neighbor says, snidely. “You don’t want any more trouble, I bet.”

“Hm,” Naprem says, putting a thoughtful look on her face. She tilts her head so her scar will catch the light. “You know, if I were you, I don’t think I’d take that bet. Not with a full consideration of the facts.”

“What do you mean?” asks her neighbor, a wary look crossing their face.

“I mean,” Naprem says, slowly bringing her hands up to rest on her hips, “if I were you, I wouldn’t depend on the Cardassians to keep you safe from me.”

She puts her foot down hard next to her neighbor’s hand and they jump back, shock written on their face.

“Put it back, please,” Naprem says.

They dart back to snatch it and toss it back in place; their supporter looks on, mortified.

Naprem stakes out her place on the roll for the rest of the night, heart thundering. She keeps her face stoic, but she can barely contain her anxiety – she doesn’t know that she thought that little stunt all the way through, and now the whispers around her are intensifying. But when Onea and Uru find her, she’s glad she did it.

“We heard what you did,” Onea whispers, coming over to her immediately and sitting down beside her.

“You’re going to make it worse,” Uru says. “You’re just scaring people now. Prophets, do you ever think about the consequences of your actions?”

“Not always,” Naprem murmurs. “But I’m trying to.”

Uru gives her a look, frowning with worry, but Onea kisses her cheek and squeezes her shoulder. To be received back into the sphere of their affection is a weight off her chest. She steadfastly ignores the whispers, the stares, the heat and wariness boiling in her gut.

 _Small victories_ , she tells herself, when the anxiety keeps sleep from her. _Small victories._


	3. Man Nor Crowd Nor Country

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Naprem is faced with the blunt edge of her people's disapproval for the first time. It stings.

**Zarpek Fishery, Yynys, Bajor – Winter, 2329**

* * *

 

Uru isn’t wrong, of course. Naprem asserting herself does make things worse. The quiet guardedness of their bunkmates has boiled over into a pungent froth of hostility by morning. Naprem can feel it in the air - the hair on her cheeks and the back of her neck stands on end. She can hear it like a ringing in her ears. She can taste contempt in the morning air before she even opens her eyes.

Before she’s even awake for roll call, someone steps on her hand on their way over their bedroll. As she’s making her way down the stairs, someone trips her – she barely catches herself on the railing, and she doesn’t turn around quick enough to see who it was. On her way into the factory, someone shoves her hard into the turnstiles, leaving a heavy bruise along her hip. She catches her neighbor’s friend from last night retreating through the crowd and picks herself up.

She supposes she should’ve seen this coming – she issued a challenge to the social pecking order, and now the residents of the fifth floor are determined to show her her place. She did see this coming, in a way. Onea and Uru press in close around her, trying to keep her safe, but the air is bitter and people are glaring at her openly now. She swallows her anxiety and keeps her head down through her first shift.

“Unbelievable,” Onea scoffs.

“Unfathomable,” Uru mutters.

Predictable, Naprem thinks. Insultingly predictable.

She’s walking out into the yard for her midday meal, just slightly out of step with her aunts, when someone knocks her down. Uru gasps her name just as she goes skidding across the dirt, barely getting her hands down in time.

She’s expecting her neighbor, but when she looks up, her assailant is someone else – a woman with slumped shoulders and light, wiry hair who she’s seen on the fifth floor from time to time. She stands over Naprem with an air of victoriousness about her, chin jutting out with pride.

Onea’s at Naprem’s side in an instant, helping her up. “Are you alright?”

“I saw what you did,” the woman says.

“Which was what, exactly?” Naprem asks through gritted teeth, struggling back to her feet.

“I heard what you said,” the woman says, with greater eagerness. “Last night. We all heard it.”

There’s a crowd gathering around them, some people looking over at them in confusion, others narrowing their eyes, looking suspiciously between Naprem and her assailant. The woman looks around, lighting up under their attention.

“You threatened Yurben!” she crows, triumphantly. “You said you’d call the Cardassians on him – you thought nobody heard you, but I did ! We all did!”

Naprem barely catches herself in time – her instant compulsion is to roll her eyes. Uru looks at her, then at the woman.

“Did you really say that?” she whispers.

“No!” Naprem hisses back, but the woman carries on, and the entire yard is beginning to peer over to see what the fuss is about.

“You thought you could hide it,” the woman shouts. “But now we all know the truth! Collaborator!”

“What?!” Onea barks, but the word goes through the yard like a gunshot. Instantly, every one of the workers is on high alert – Naprem feels like she’s just touched an electric fence. Her heart jolts out of time with her body, and her chest floods with anger and fear.

“Stop,” Naprem says, sharply, but the woman has a captive audience now and she knows it.

“Admit it!” she cries. “Collaborator!” Someone in the crowd jeers, and then another, and Naprem looks around to find herself surrounded on all sides by a wall of people, all looking increasingly scared and angry.

“I’m not a Collaborator!” Naprem shouts, but the crowd is becoming a living entity in front of her face, shouting and shaking their fists, and her aunts press in close. Uru is clinging so tightly to her arm that she’s losing circulation in her fingers.

“Oh for—You all should be ashamed of yourselves!” Onea yells, squeezing Naprem’s other hand. “If we were Collaborators, don’t you think we’d be living the high life? Why would we stay down here in the mud with all of you ?”

“Onea!” Uru hisses, but it’s a little late to take it all back – the crowd surges forward, shouting and jeering, words incoherent through the noise.

“Collaborators!” the woman shrieks, and the crowd joins in. “Collaborators!” they shout, and Naprem is turning her head, looking for an escape route.  There’s no use reasoning with them like this, and if she and her aunts don’t escape soon, she’s not sure she’s going to see tomorrow. Her heart is beating so fast it hurts her chest. She can barely hear anything in the thickening fear.

“Professor Tora!” someone calls through the crowd. “Professor Tora!” And then Suga is shoving his way through the people, reaching for her, and she takes her chance, seizing both her aunts by the hand and shoving through the crowd to him. He takes Uru by the hand and they push through the crowd in a rush, people lunging at them, tearing at their hair and beating at their faces and shoulders, spitting on them. Someone deals Naprem a stinging blow to the cheek and she ducks in, trying to shield her head.

Suga grabs her around the shoulders and pulls her into him, guarding her, and then Pama and Taya are there, shoving the crowd back, and then others join them, diving into the fray and pulling Naprem and her aunts out into the open air, shouting. In seconds, the whole yard has erupted into chaos, schisming down the center – Naprem can hear her assailant shouting after her a few yards away, can hardly see through the whirligig of noise and color. She feels like she’s being dragged through the ocean, caught by the ankle by a powerful riptide, upside down and sideways, trying to follow her bubbles to the open air even as they get lost in the surf. There’s blood in her mouth where her teeth cut the inside of her cheek, and Suga is holding her tight, yelling back, and Uru is clutching her hand so tight she’s leaving the impression of her nails in Naprem’s skin, and she can’t make out any words through the riotous clamor, the noise like unceasing gunfire, grasping, angry fingers just inches away, held back by other shouting, angry bodies.

Then there’s a shriek, and like a flock of sinoraptors the Cardassians descend on them from all sides. People go down into the dirt one after the other, some in pairs, some in groups – Naprem turns her head in vain, trying to see what’s happening. People are screaming and shouting for help. Suga grips her close seconds before he’s torn away from her, warm calloused fingers streaking over her shoulders as a guard manhandles him onto the ground. Naprem throws herself down, shielding Uru’s body with hers, and Onea leaps down with them, huddling close. Bodies hit the dirt all over the courtyard, dropping like bags of sand, and the clamor peters out in fits and starts. For a few seconds, all Naprem can hear is her own breathing, her own heart beating hard in her ears. She can smell Onea’s sweet breath, too, and the dirt, and the sea. Is her lip bleeding? Her gums? Her mouth tastes red as copper.

She peeks up through her arms, covering her head, just as Glinn Zevat steps out into the thin spring sunlight, tail swinging slowly back and forth. Her armor glistens as she steps slowly over the prone bodies strewn about the courtyard; her serious face is pursed and frowning.

Zevat turns her head and one of her guardsmen moves forward, snatching up the woman who assaulted Naprem. He rips her up from the ground like a weed, holding her by the upper arm, and she shrieks, batting at him.

“Take her to the Gul,” Zevat says.

“No!” the woman screams, voice breaking on her own terror. Her eyes are wide with panic. “No! It was Tora, Tora started it! It’s her fault!”

Zevat looks over at Naprem, and Naprem feels her heart jolt in her chest. She ducks her head, swelling with fear and embarrassment.

She hears Zevat coming – her taloned feet are almost delicate in the dirt, careful and steady, perfectly-balanced. She steps over half a courtyard full of bodies, never treading on a single one, and as she comes near, she seems so much bigger. She comes to a stop beside Naprem’s head, and stands there, still, for almost a full minute. The only sound is the call of birds from the forest, and the crashing of waves far below.

Slowly, Naprem raises her head, peeking up at her. Zevat’s gazing down at her, a strange look on her face – some combination of patience and curiosity.

“Tora,” she says, flatly.

“Yes,” Naprem says, trying to be casual.

“Did you have any part in starting this?”

Naprem opens her mouth, blinking a little, but her lip starts to sting – she looks down, dabs at it with her finger. It comes away red. She doesn’t know what to say; for a moment her mind simply buzzes with static.

“Tora,” Zevat says. “I won’t ask you again.”

“I’m bleeding,” Naprem says, feeling a little dazed.

“I can see that,” says Zevat.

“She didn’t do anything wrong,” Suga says, suddenly. Naprem glances up to find him a few feet from her, a guard’s foot in his back, keep him down. The right side of his face is smeared with dirt – he glares hatefully up at Zevat, teeth bared.

“I didn’t ask you,” Zevat says, folding her arms.

“There was an altercation,” Suga continues, heedless, and the guard looks over at Zevat, who shakes her head a little. “The woman falsely accused Professor Tora of collaborating with you Cardassians . I assume you saw what happened next.”

Zevat scoffs and rolls her eyes.

“Aren’t you all technically collaborating with us?” she says, under her breath. “Idiots.” She makes a sharp tutting sound behind her teeth, shakes her head. She puts her hands on her hips, and turns to address the yard. “Quit trying to kill each other over nothing. You’re all Collaborators as far as we’re concerned.”

She turns to the guard holding Suga down, and jerks her head to the left. “Get Tora up,” she tells him. “Everyone else back to work!” she shouts to the yard.

“We’re on break!” someone protests.

Zevat scoffs. “Break’s over. Get back to your stations.”

No one moves. Zevat sighs visibly.

“Get back to your stations, or you can all have an appointment with the Gul.”

The guards chortle amongst themselves, stepping back and watching. The workers slowly get up out of the dirt. The guard holding Suga down steps off him to scoop Naprem up onto her feet faster than she’s ready for – she wobbles a little and he squeezes her arm tight, leaving bruises along her arm in the shape of his fingers. Onea scrambles up beside her, grabbing for her hand, but the Cardassian jerks her away.

“Please!” Uru cries, getting to her feet. “Please, she did nothing wrong!”

The guard drags Naprem over to Zevat, and Naprem sees Suga get up, face flushed with anger, looking like he’s about to lunge at them. She grabs for the guard’s hand.

“I can walk,” she says, quickly. “I can walk.”

Zevat looks her over, and another guard comes forward to clamp his hand along the back of Suga’s neck. Zevat nods, and the guard holding Naprem releases her.

“With me, Tora,” Zevat says. And to her aunts, she says: “Get back to work. Now.”

“I’ll be fine,” Naprem tells them. “It’ll be alright.”

Onea takes Uru in her arms and holds her tight, staring around at the Cardassians with a fierce look on her face. They don’t say anything as Naprem’s led off, but they never look away, even when she stops being able to turn and look back.

* * *

 

Naprem tries to keep her breathing even, tries to keep her panic constrained – but there’s something about being led around by a Cardassian contingent of guards that makes her scar burn like it’s being made anew, and makes her taste mud in the back of her mouth.

Zevat leads her out of the way, off to the side. They stand in the shadow of Factory 4; after a moment, Zevat jerks her chin. “Go,” she says to the guards, and they do, turning and heading back towards the yard to help herd the workers back to their stations.

Zevat folds her arms, looking at Naprem expectantly, and Naprem wonders if she’s supposed to divine what this is all about. After a second of being stared at, she begins to wonder if Zevat already asked her a question and is waiting for the answer – she feels dizzy, lip burning and bleeding, blood thick with fear, heart still working like the bellows of a bonfire.

“Is this a game to you?” Zevat says, and Naprem makes it out over the roar of blood in her ears.

“No,” she says.

“Because I’m done playing games with you, Tora.”

“This isn’t a game to me,” Naprem says.

“Oh?” Zevat scoffs, looking unconvinced. “What was all that about, then?”

“I don’t know,” Naprem says, honestly.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t!” Naprem insists. “Ever since—” No, she thinks, stopping herself. Blaming Zevat won’t get her anywhere in this conversation. She tries again: “Ever since we were relocated, there’s been…friction. Between us and the other workers.”

“Why?” Zevat asks, face still utterly unconvinced.

“I don’t know,” Naprem says.

“Guess.”

Naprem opens her mouth, completely at a loss – it feels like her brain is filled with static, and Zevat’s severe gaze makes her feel like she’s never had a coherent thought in her life, as though all languages are foreign. She tries, desperately, to formulate an answer.

“I—” She flounders, and she hates herself for it. Her face flushes, and her mouth hurts, and she’s struggling to breathe. She’s panicking, she realizes. She doesn’t even really remember the question. “I was almost just—killed by a mob on your watch, and you think now is a good time to interrogate me?”

“Yes,” Zevat says. “I do.”

Naprem continues to struggle, trying to find the words. “The others—interpreted my relocation as a sign that I wasn’t to be trusted. They took it upon themselves to enact punishment in…a variety of unpleasant ways. I pushed back. That was enough to inflame their suspicion.”

“You’re shaking,” Zevat observes, dispassionate as ever.

“Of course I’m shaking!” Naprem snaps. “I almost—Prophets, if Suga hadn’t done something—”

“No invocations,” Zevat warns her.

“And where were you?” Naprem says, against her better judgment. “You must’ve seen what was happening. Why didn’t you act sooner?”

“I saw.”

“And?”

“Looked like you might be about to incite a riot,” Zevat says. “I needed to know what level of force to use to pacify all of you.”

“You needed to know if it was worth killing all of us over, you mean,” Naprem says, and it’s not fear that’s making her shake now; it’s outrage.

Zevat purses her lips and frowns.

“We’ve never had an incident like this before,” she says. “You’re a disruptive influence, Tora.”

“Me?” Naprem says, trying not to gape. “I didn’t do anything!”

“You’ve done plenty,” Zevat says. “If the other workers see you as a troublemaker, that’s nobody’s fault but yours.”

“And yours,” Naprem says, and it’s clear to the hysterical voice of her common sense that she’s past the point of restraining herself now. She’s done being careful, and her anger bolsters courage.

Zevat frowns deeper, narrowing her eyes.

“Have I ever been unfair to you, Tora?” she asks.

“No,” Naprem admits. “But you don’t need to be. This whole damn system is unfair enough that it pits us against one another anyway. I didn’t do anything to that woman,” she says. “I didn’t need to. The amount of injustice she’s suffered has made her willing to pin her misfortune on anyone who so much as looks the part. That’s what that was all about. This whole camp is a powderkeg. Morale is low. People are looking for someone to blame for their suffering, and you gave them me.”

“You can’t break the rules and go unpunished,” Zevat says, teeth flashing.

“The rules are intolerable,” Naprem says back, showing her own, blunt as they are. “I have no choice but to break them. Maybe if my life weren’t aliving hell , I’d reconsider.”

Zevat scoffs. “You were at Rize, and you think this is hell?”

“This time last year I had a career,” Naprem snarls. “I had a house, and a bed. I ate five full meals a day. Now, I’m a slave on my own planet. You can dress that reality up as pretty as you want, but that’s still what it’s going to be. I live in a waking nightmare that never ends. I don’t know a person alive – Bajoran or Cardassian – who wouldn’t resent that.”

Zevat regards her slowly. She scrutinizes her, examining her face and her shoulders. Naprem clenches her fists at her sides, trying not to let the tendrils of anxiety lash against the inside of her chest.

“You realize this is the first time you’ve ever been completely honest with me,” Zevat says, finally, just when Naprem’s begun to wonder if she’s going to say anything at all. Naprem can’t decipher anything from her tone, but she shifts her hips slowly, cocking them to the side just so, tip of her tail flicking.

“I’ve been honest with you before,” Naprem says, taken aback.

“No you haven’t,” Zevat says. “You’ve always been trying to manipulate me somehow.”

“Not always,” Naprem says, flushing with embarrassment.

“Listen,” Zevat says. “I don’t play games. We’ve been real nice to you so far – you want hell, we’re more than happy to provide. This is how things are now. You don't have to like it. You just have to get used to it.

“But,” she says, before Naprem can interrupt, “I get it. You want to make demands sometimes. You like to feel big. You get off on it. Whatever. I don’t really care. You catch me on a good day, I’ll think about it. But no more games. You tell me what you want, straight out. You tell me why you want it. I’ll tell you if it’s possible. And when I tell you to stand down, you stand down. No questions. No exceptions. You do not want Gul Zuvun getting involved with this.”

“I tell you,” Naprem says, disbelievingly.

“Yes,” Zevat says, flatly.

“I don’t understand,” Naprem says.

“Yes, you do,” Zevat says.

“I don’t understand what you stand to gain from that sort of arrangement.”

“How about five minutes of peace?” Zevat says, folding her arms tighter and leaning forward, forcing Naprem back a step. “You’re a problem I could solve a lot of ways, Tora. You want me to try something else?”

“No, sir.”

“Good.” Zevat jerks her chin towards the factory. “Get back to work.”

* * *

 

Naprem returns to Factory 4 in a daze. It’s only the second time she’s ever passed through the doors alone - several people turn their heads as she comes in, craning to get a good look at her. The Cardassians watch too, keeping their positions as she goes through the turnstiles, gets her gloves on, and begins the long walk to her spot on the line. It feels as though there’s a spotlight on her, as though she’s a player who missed her stage cue, and it makes the whole experience feel almost out of body.

She finds her aunts on the line and takes her place beside them. No one says anything to her, at first. She can still feel people staring, but the only sound is the low whirring of the conveyor belt, the whistle of the ocean wind up the cliffs, the occasional rattle of the chains holding the nets.

She’s almost convinced no one’s going to say anything at all when Uru turns away from the conveyor belt and throws her arms around her neck all at once. Naprem’s so startled she almost neglects to hold her back -- Uru squeezes her so tightly she loses her breath. Her gloved hands are cold and slimy from the fish, but Naprem doesn’t mind. She can feel something wet where Uru presses her face to her chest -- hot, quiet tears.

“We thought,” Uru gasps into her chest. “We thought…”

Naprem holds her tight until the Cardassians bark at them to separate.

When the woman who assaulted her returns to the barracks, they’re just turning in for light’s out. Naprem only glimpses her -- she comes back baring an angry red scar along her upper lip. Naprem turns over on her bedroll and tries to forget seeing it.

* * *

 

Their midday meal privileges are revoked for a week. Instead, they’re fed in the barracks after work when they should be having free time in the yard. When they're allowed to eat at midday again, they're separated into two groups, so the yard is only ever half as full as it once was. Only Taya, and Eri, and her aunts remain in Naprem’s midday group -- Suga, Pama, Jozke and the rest are separated into the second group, and meals without them are quiet and a little awkward.

Despite Glinn Zevat’s insistence to the contrary, Naprem really has no idea why she said what she did after what becomes known around the camp as the Incident in the Yard. She has absolutely no idea what she was proposing -- a partnership of some kind? She can’t even begin to understand how this is all supposed to work, even theoretically. She hasn’t the slightest idea what to tell anyone who asks about it, either. It seems like a delicate arrangement, regardless of how it’s supposed to work; something she ought to keep to herself until she understands more about how it operates.

Luckily, everyone who asks is more than willing to make up their own version of what happened.

“She hit you somewhere that wouldn’t show, huh?” Pama says at midday meal the first day they're allowed back, her mouth full, per usual. “I can tell. You’re limping.”

She isn’t limping, not at all; she’s walking slow to stay close to Uru who’s been quiet and fearful and clinging ever since the incident. But when she says as much, Pama just shakes her head dismissively.

“You don’t have to be strong in front of us,” she says, as though Naprem’s insulted her.

“Did they forbid you talk about it?” Eri asks.

“No,” Naprem says, but she must say it too quickly because Eri and Jozke share a look and shake their heads as though she’s being obvious.

Even Suga gets in on it during their evening walk. He’s still angry -- it’s in the way he walks and the way he holds himself. Naprem thinks he got hurt when the Cardassians took him down, but if he did he won’t show her. He doesn’t even seem to remember that it was actually their fellow Bajorans that almost killed them.

“The gall of her,” he snarls, his voice like the crashing waves on the cliff face, savage and relentless. “There’s nothing she could’ve done that would’ve made you look more like a Collaborator, surely you know that. She made me look like a fool for defending you. She made you look like a liar! And what else is anyone supposed to think? These damn Cardassian fearmongers. This is exactly what they’ve wanted all along.”

In fact, almost everyone appears to feel that the Cardassians are mostly to blame for what happened. They even manage, somehow, to completely ignore almost everything that prefaced their intervention, from the unfriendliness of the other workers to the woman who assaulted Naprem in the first place.

Naprem mentions this to Onea as they patrol the edge of the camp after work one night, searching through thick tufts of figa grass for new shoots, which they intend to use to make a numbing poultice for Naprem’s still-swollen lip. Onea simply shakes her head and clicks her tongue against her teeth.

“Better that they blame Glinn Zevat than you,” she says. “The last time they blamed you, they tried to kill us.”

Naprem isn’t sure whether she’s talking about the mob in the yard, or about Rize. Either way, she supposes she’s right.


	4. Next to Godliness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spring arrives in Zarpek, bringing a strong bout of hayfever and a new face with it. Suga doesn't agree with Naprem's method of asking politely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [EDIT 2/13/18] I mentioned a few chapters ago that I've begun adding art from various wonderful people - you'll find another in this chapter, a sketch by the delightful [cohobbitation](http://cohobbitation.tumblr.com/) who is just the very best, if we're being totally honest. Hobbs and I met through this fic, and they have been lighting up my life ever since. I absolutely loved this Naprem sketch they sent me and I just had to show it off to all a y'all. So much love!!! LLAP

** **

_Tora Naprem by[cohobbitation](http://cohobbitation.tumblr.com/post/167436270823/professor-tora-naprem-in-collaboration-hoho)_

* * *

 

**Zarpek Fishery, Yynys, Bajor – Spring, 2329**

* * *

 

Spring shuffles in slowly over the horizon like a maligned drunk. The warmth comes on reticently in fits and spurts; for the most part, it’s still cool out, still cold in the morning and the evening. But the sky clears, and the sun glares out at them, hung-over, still too grumpy to do much.

The plants don’t mind a bit -- within weeks the yard is covered in blossoming green and the trees along the top of the walls have burst into great, vibrant bouquets of color. It makes Naprem feel both more at home and much, much dirtier. Her clothes feel dingy in comparison to the beautiful watercolor of the jungle; she feels like a dull patch of dirt in a field of wildflowers. She clearly isn’t the only person who feels that way, either. Even as the weather slowly becomes more bearable, the grumblings about the stubborn grime of winter became as constant as the roar of the ocean far below.

Laundry with the Cardassians has always been a little slice of hell -- they run it while the workers are in the showers, one or two Cardassian guards who are always sour about being on janitorial duty, who have the singular task of taking their uniforms and putting them in the washing unit, and entering in the cycle parameters. When the Bajorans emerge to retrieve them, they’re always stiff and sterile, cold, a little tight at the seams, a little grayer than when they went in. There’s usually some powdered cleaning agent left under the collar and along the inseam, and the people who forget to shake it out quickly regret it -- it’s far too harsh for Bajoran skin, and leaves long, rosy rashes in its wake. Onea is often called by workers around the camp to help soothe with the itching, which she does with a cream she makes from figa grass and fallen bateret leaves she finds at the base of the wall.

There’s always been talk of pushing back -- pushing for new uniforms, better service, something -- but it’s never been quite as spirited as it is now, with the bright light of spring beginning to expose just how very sorry the state of affairs has become. They all look like little daubs of mud, like paint at the edge of a palette, ugly and swirled together. Depending on the day, they either reek of sterility, or of dirt and fish.

“It’s undignified,” Taya says as they take their seat near the cliff.

“It’s unsanitary,” Onea says. “That’s what you ought to worry about.”

After a few weeks, Naprem couldn’t agree more. The warmth of spring ushers in all types of illnesses -- colds, allergies, and a stubborn strain of spring flu that sweeps through half the camp, leaving the workers groggy and unpleasant, noses bright red and sleeves caked in a thin layer of dried mucus. Onea makes Naprem and Uru chew dried tuko flowers to avoid it; it gives them terrible breath for the next week and a half, but it works, much to Suga’s bitter amusement.

“If I could smell anything, my dear, I’m sure I’d find you repugnant,” he says, hoarsely, mopping at his nose with a spare piece of cloth.

“Just what a girl likes to hear,” Naprem says, wincing -- her breath is so bad that it makes her eyes water.

The constant sneezing and coughing makes work miserable -- one worker will start coughing and it’ll echo up the whole line in a wave. The Cardassians seem disturbed by it, shying away from anyone who looks visibly ill and giving them all suspicious, wary looks. Three weeks in, things are beginning to reach critical mass and a command comes down the chain -- mandatory showers every day before roll call and after hours. Laundry is, as always, done at the same time. Overnight, the number of people with rashes triples. Even Naprem gets a bad patch of it down the back of her neck, and it itches terribly. The entire camp stinks of cleaning agent. Soon, the smell of it is enough to give her a headache.

Everyone objects to the situation -- most of them loudly -- but no one can decide what they ought to do about it. There’s no cohesive idea of what anyone in the camp particularly wants , so much as there is a cohesive idea of what they don’t want. The energy’s changed, too, since the riot, and it isn’t just about the weather or the laundry or cold season. The workers are more on-edge, hungry for a restitution of justice and not sure where to find it.

Nowhere is this hunger more visible than among Suga and the girls. Having gotten a brief taste of protest, they’re eager for more, and there seems to be no clear outlet for their energy and frustration. Pama gets into two verbal altercations with the guards within the same week; Jozke stages a one-woman strike when her uniform comes out of the wash so thick with powdered cleanser that it gives her a rash across her entire body; Taya outright refuses to get back in her uniform one day, after the rash on her back and shoulders opens up into lesions. The Cardassians very nearly send her back to her station naked, which almost causes a riot of a completely different nature.

Suga’s anger has never really dissipated since the riot -- he carries himself differently, lately. His shoulders are stiff, his brow heavy, and his hands are almost always curled into angry fists. He vibrates like a taut string, like a man ready to go into battle. Even when he and Naprem walk at night, he never seems completely calm. He often snaps at her, or changes the subject mid-conversation.

“We ought to do something,” he mutters suddenly one night, as they’re circling the yard. He walks faster than he used to, putting his feet down with greater force than she thinks is strictly necessary.

“I don’t know what we can do,” she tells him. “I’m not sure what we’d ask for. And things with the Cardassians are tense as it is.”

“Of course they are,” Suga scoffs, glowering at a soldier as they pass. “When aren’t they? I’m tired of moving according to the Cardassians’ comfort.”

“It’s not their comfort I worry about,” says Naprem.

Suga sighs, shakes his head. “I know you don’t. I don’t know why I’m acting like you’re the enemy all of a sudden.”

“Neither do I.”

“The girls want to take action. It’s all they talk about anymore.”

“And you?” Naprem asks.

Suga sighs again and looks away. “I want to feel just a little less sorry for myself, to tell you the truth. I’m tired of living at the mercy of others.”

Naprem shakes her head a little and tries to think. But Suga starts up again before she can put her thoughts into words. “It’s absurd,” he says. “They should be providing us medical care. That’s their job, isn’t it? I could expect better treatment in a Bajoran prison. ”

“You’re not in a Bajoran prison.”

“They could at least use a milder cleaning agent,” he says. “It’s their fault we’re all sick in the first place, packing us into those barracks like that.”

“Is there somewhere else they could move us?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” Suga says. “I suppose Eri or Jozke might know -- I have no idea how much of the facility they’re actually using.”

“You’d think there’d be a medical officer at a factory this large,” Naprem says.

“If there is, I’ve never seen hide nor hair of them.”

“Well, that might be a place to start,” Naprem says. “Has anyone asked to see them?”

Suga halts in his tracks, mid-stride, and looks back at her like she’s just quoted Oralian scripture.

“Asked?” he repeats, as though the very idea offends him. “Who would we ask ? Who would be fool enough to risk life and limb to ask a Cardassian for medical assistance?”

Naprem shrugs a little, feeling a little embarrassed by his reaction. “I might.”

Suga scoffs like she’s made a joke. “This is serious, Naprem. We need real solutions.”

“I know,” she says, but he talks over her, walking on.

“You have a good head on your shoulders,” he says. “Don’t insult me by pretending otherwise.”

Naprem stays standing there, ears burning, face tingling and hot, throat tight with mortification. She sees him turn his head to look back at her, and doesn’t wait for an invitation to follow him; she pivots, instead, and goes inside. When he calls after her, she doesn’t answer, and she doesn’t look back. She keeps her mouth clamped shut for the rest of the night.

The next day, in the middle of the courtyard during midday meal, Eri covers herself in fish blood and throws herself to the ground, hollering about injustice and Cardassian indifference. She’s coated in thick foul smelling mud from head to toe and when the soldiers haul her up and take her away for questioning Naprem sees several of them grimace and wince at the odor. Zevat grabs her by the forearm not ten minutes later as she’s filing back into the factory with the other workers, who all seem very confused by what they’ve just seen.

“What the hell was that,” Zevat grunts, barely making it sound like a question.

“A protest of a series of injustices we need rectified presently,” Naprem tells her, only partially because she’s still angry at Suga. “The cleaning agent you use on our uniforms is too harsh - it gives us rashes and lesions. The barracks are too crowded - that’s why everyone’s getting sick. And the illnesses we have would be easily rectified if we were provided access to even the most basic medical care.”

Zevat puts her hands on her hips and shakes her head a little. “Wouldn’t that put your aunt out of a job?”

Naprem raises her eyebrows and tries to hide her disgust. “You’ve been spying on me?”

“I don’t need to,” Zevat says. “You don’t hide it.”

“A good doctor worries about the health of her patients,” Naprem tells her. “Not the health of her business.” She tries not to sound too haughty about it.

Zevat scrutinizes her face for a moment, then expels a little huff through her nose that makes her headfeathers rise, just slightly. “Fine. I’ll look into it. Get back to work.”

* * *

 

The next day, before dismissing them from roll call, Glinn Zevat comes to stand in front of them, with a small, pudgy Bajoran at her side. There’s a buzz that goes through the rows, unruly and persistent -- a few of the loudest murmurers get cuffed by the guards, but everyone’s talking, turning to whisper to one another, and they can’t get to all of them. Naprem tries to look past the people in front of her -- the Bajoran is short and clean-shaven with soft, rounded jowls and a potbelly. Their cheeks and the tip of their nose are rosy, and they look nervous, swallowing thickly, looking around, tricorder clutched in their hands. Naprem could swear she’s seen them before, but can’t place where.

“Who is that?” Onea asks, peering over Naprem's shoulder.

“I don't recognize them,” Naprem whispers back.

“Looks familiar,” Onea says.

It's Uru who makes the connection -- she gasps, and claps a hand over her mouth.

“It's the man from before,” Uru whispers, words almost running together as they scramble out of her mouth. “The Collaborator!”

Now, the uneasy buzz among the workers makes sense. Zevat frowns, as the sound swells, then finally barks for silence. It comes, but not easily -- the murmuring peters out, but the toxic energy remains, coursing just beneath the sound of the ocean.

“This is Dr. Ovig Yaien,” she says, as two other guards come to stand on either side of him. Dr. Ovig looks up at them, face creased with worry. Zevat continues on, ignoring them: “He’ll be coming around to administer a brief physical examination and your seasonal vaccines.”

One man leans out of line near the front and asks, loudly:

“What if we refuse?”

Zevat swivels her head around, owl-like, and leans in over him, very slow. Naprem sees him shrink back, wincing.

“Then you claim responsibility for the consequences,” Zevat says, lowly.

“For those of you who enjoy looking after your health,” she says to the rest of them, “I advise you to comply.”

She turns her head to look at the doctor. He swallows again, but nods shakily, and takes a few shy steps forward.

The man who spoke before spits at his feet. “Collaborator,” he says, loud enough for everyone to hear.

Dr. Ovig recoils with a wounded expression. Without a word, the guard on his right clubs the man in line across the face, throwing him to the ground. Dr. Ovig jumps, looking stricken.

“No!” Naprem hears him hiss. “No, please…! No violence.”

“You will treat the doctor with respect,” Zevat says, voice booming through the courtyard. “Or you’ll be dealt with.”

There’s another wave of noise as everyone shifts uncomfortably, buzzing like insects, clucking like hens. Dr. Ovig swallows a third time, looking around. He moves slowly forward, but the workers move away from him, folding their arms, glaring at him with disdain.

“I…” He starts to speak, then tapers off. He squeezes his tricorder. “Um. Please. Who will be first? I… Obviously, I won’t administer any readings without your express permission, so…”

He looks around, lost, but no one comes forward. It hurts Naprem’s heart to watch -- his whole face glows with wanton kindness, with desire to help, to belong, but every face he looks into glares back at him. People hold themselves apart from him, faces twisted with contempt.

She watches until she can no longer bear it. He turns to look back helplessly at Zevat just as Naprem puts out her hand and calls up the row:

“Dr. Ovig!” She waves her hand a little, and he turns back around to look at her, seeming a little startled. “Dr. Ovig, if you please!”

“Put your hand down!” Uru hisses, eyes wide with fear.

“Hush,” Onea tells her, looking around at their peers, who are staring at them in shock. “If we have to be the ones to show a little common decency, so be it.”

Dr. Ovig hurries over to them, looking around. He’s shorter even than Naprem by a few inches -- as he comes near, she can see his hairline is receding a little. He reminds her of a vedek at the monastery near the house she grew up in, the one who carried her home to her mother after the incident when she was thirteen. He smells like lilac cologne.  

“You’re sure?” he asks, looking worried. “It isn’t mandatory.”

“Absolutely certain,” Naprem says, and people are glaring at her now, and though it scares her, she refuses to show it. Dr. Ovig looks fearfully up at her and she smiles back at him, as though she doesn’t smell the hostility in the air, or feel the eyes on the back of her head. “Go ahead,” she tells him.

Dr. Ovig nods a little and looks down at his tricorder, flicking it on. The guard on his left takes out a PADD, looking over Ovig’s shoulder and taking notes.

“You’re...Miss Tora, correct?” he asks.

“Technically, that’s all of us,” Onea replies.

“Really?” Ovig asks, with a small, wry grin. “Not a ‘Mrs.’ among you?”

Onea turns to look pointedly at Uru, who wrinkles her nose.

“Don’t look at me,” Uru says. “My husband’s as late as yours is.”

“True,” Onea says. “But ‘Mrs.’ always feels much dowdier, I think it suits you.”

Uru gasps and swats her in the arm. “I’m not dowdy !”

“You’re the very definition of the word,” Onea says, haughtily.

“Ladies,” Ovig says, more warmly than Naprem expects. “Please. I assure you, you’re all perfectly marriageable.”

“‘Marriageable’ he called me!” Onea grins.

“Well, there really is a first time for everything,” Uru grumbles.

Ovig’s tricorder chirps, lighting up green, and he waves the guard on his right forward. “Miss Tora,” he says, looking up at Naprem, “I’m delighted to tell you you’re the very picture of health. Now, if it’s alright, Garresh Licil here will administer your seasonal vaccines.”

“It’s perfectly alright with me,” Naprem says. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“I’m curious,” Ovig says to Onea, taking his reading of her. “It seems you’ve both managed to avoid the spring flu.”

“All three of us,” Onea says, proudly, gesturing to Uru.

In front of them, Garresh Licil takes out a hypospray applicator and presses it to Naprem’s arm. There’s a slight pinch and a short whoosh ing, and then he pulls it away and refills it with another cannister.

“May I ask how?” There’s a light coming into Ovig’s eyes, something rare and pleasant; he looks handsome as it happens, curiosity lighting up his rounded features. “It’s quite aggressive this year.”

“Dried tuko,” Onea says. “Old trick we use down in Musilla -- not the most pleasant remedy, but it works.”

“Tuko,” Ovig says with evident delight. “That’s brilliant. I’ve heard of it being used in oral antivirals, but never raw.”

“More potent that way,” Onea says. “Have to dry it, chew it, then hold it under your tongue, near the back of your mouth, so it can get through to the sinuses.”

“You’re in traditional medicine,” Ovig concludes, tricorder chirping.

“Used to be,” Onea says.

Ovig smiles, but there’s a deep sadness to it this time. “Once a doctor always a doctor, in my experience.”

He moves on to Uru and Onea puts her thin arm out to receive her shots. “‘Licil’,” she says to the Garresh. “What’s that mean?”

“‘Precision,’” says the Garresh, frowning down at her.

“Cardassians,” Onea says to Uru, shaking her head. “No sense of artistry.”

“But a sense of propriety!” Uru snaps, looking mortified. “She doesn’t mean anything by it,” she says to the Garresh. “Please don’t mind her.”

“Oh, it’s a fine name,” Onea says. “Very dignified. Just a little boring, that’s all.”

“What’s ‘Tora’ mean?” the Garresh asks. “‘Nosy busybody’?”

“Now that’s rude,” Onea says to Uru.

“But not inaccurate,” Naprem admits, under her breath.

Ovig’s tricorder chirps and he smiles at Uru -- Naprem sees her aunt flush a little, going pink in the cheeks. “Well,” he says, “I’m happy to say you’re all in good health. With your seasonal vaccines, and advisement from Miss Onea, I think you’ll be able to make it through cold and allergy season without much trouble.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Naprem says, and she sees his brow crease, chin puckering just before he smiles again.

“Not at all,” he says. “I’m only too happy to help. Thank you , Miss Tora.”

He steps away as the Garresh moves on to administer Uru’s shots. Naprem sees him look slowly around the yard again. He clears his throat nervously.

“Um. Well then,” he says. “Who’d like to be next?”

There’s another prolonged moment of silence that makes Naprem feel like she’s swallowed a rock. Dr. Ovig looks out at the congregation and they look back, motionless. She regrets volunteering to go first, regrets that she can’t occupy all of his time, shield him from their unkindness -- already, she sees the confidence slipping from his shoulders, the light draining out of his face.

Then, a ways away, she sees Taya put out her hand, leaning out of her line. She doesn’t say anything, but Naprem sees the relief it brings Dr. Ovig. He smiles again, hurries over to her, and Naprem lets herself sigh as a few other people step out of line to call him over. They stand out in the yard for almost an hour as he works, and though she hears several people muttering cruel things under their breath as they head to their stations, Ovig catches her eye and smiles at her, and she smiles back, feeling, for the first time in a long time, like she’s done the right thing.

* * *

 

Suga finds her at night, after hours, as he usually does. She’s pacing a track along the wall -- the wind’s come up as the sun’s gone down, and if she turns her face into it and walks just a little too fast, it feels like she could be running. It makes her legs ache and something in her chest tremble, and it makes the Cardassians watch her with an automatic, predatory hunger, as though waiting to give chase. She misses running enough to tolerate it.

Suga draws near and she feels her heart go steely and cold as he does. He seems to sense it, and waits patiently for her to acknowledge him until her good manners won’t allow her not to -- she looks over at him and keeps her face as mean as her heart feels. He looks back at her calmly.

“You’re still angry with me,” he says. “I understand.”

“Do you?” she asks.

“I do,” he says.

She stops in front of him, jabbing her finger into his chest. “You don’t call me stupid,” she says. “No matter how we disagree.”

“You know that wasn’t my intention,” he says, holding his hands up in surrender.

“I don’t care what your intention was!” she snaps, shaking her head with disbelief. “If you hurt someone, it doesn’t matter what you meant to do, it matters what you did .”

Suga purses his lips, but cants his head forward deferentially. “I apologize.”

And for just a moment, Naprem relaxes, but then he starts in again: “It’s simply that I was looking for practical solutions,” he says. “I felt you were being facetious.”

“Well, I wasn’t,” Naprem says.

“I see that now,” Suga says. “I suppose you were to blame for that little stunt this morning with the Collaborator.”

Naprem folds her arms, protective anger burning hot in her chest. It isn’t fair, she thinks, that someone so kind as Dr. Ovig should be talked about in such callous terms, as though he isn’t at least trying to help. She hardly knows him, but at the moment, she’s sure she likes him better than Suga Ede.

“We’re better off now than we were yesterday,” she tells Suga. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

“And who did you ask to enable that ‘something’?” Suga asks, snidely.

Naprem lifts her chin, glaring at him. “Glinn Zevat.”

Suga looks ill. “Professor! ” he gasps. “Don’t say that so loudly -- if anyone heard you--”

“They’d what?” Naprem asks, haughtily. “Try to kill me again?”

“I’m shocked at you,” Suga says. “To compromise your own dignity for such paltry gains--”

Naprem inhales sharply, gaping at him. “My dignity is perfectly in tact!”

“My dear,” Suga scoffs. “Surely you aren’t implying that you simply asked--”

“That is precisely what I’m implying!” Naprem says.

“If anyone found out, they’d accuse you of Collaboration,” Suga says, sternly. “And I’d be hard-pressed to defend you.”

“Then I can’t imagine you’d be trying very hard!” Naprem folds her arms tighter, unable to believe the way he’s behaving. “At the very least I got results!”

“Oh, yes,” Suga says, all but rolling his eyes. “If you can call them that.”

“And what do you call Eri’s little display yesterday?” Naprem asks.

“We needed to take action!” Suga argues. “We needed to take a stand, to call attention to the issues.”

“Well, you certainly did that. The plight of fish everywhere has been brought to the forefront of the social dialogue. Well done.”

“You weren’t helping,” Suga says. “We had to do something.”

“I could’ve helped you if you’d let me. You’re so concerned with me doing things your way that you’ve stopped caring about effecting meaningful change.”

“Only because you’ve grown so complacent!” Suga snaps.

“In what way?!”

“Do you think the Cardassians are going to return us our civil liberties because we ask politely ? Do you really think that’s how we’ll win our freedom?” Suga shakes his head, agitated. “I remembered you as a revolutionary, Naprem.”

“Revolutions have casualties,” Naprem snarls, baring her teeth.

“All great victories demand great sacrifice!” Suga argues. “We must be willing to do anything to achieve our ends -- to lay down our lives if necessary.”

“We aren’t gambling with just our lives!”

Suga gives her a look like she’s addled. “The girls chose this, the same as we did,” he says, dismissively.

“And my aunts?” she asks. “The other workers? Any innocent bystander who gets caught in the crossfire?”

“They’ll understand,” Suga says.

“No,” Naprem says. “They won’t. And neither do you. This is all--some game to you.”

“That’s not true,” Suga says, narrowing his eyes.

“Yes, it is!” Naprem says, raising her voice. “You talk about putting your life on the line without any comprehension of what that means! You’re talking about overt rebellion without even knowing what that looks like -- and let me tell you Ede, as someone who knows exactly what that looks like: if you’d like to give the Cardassians a reason to kill you, overt rebellion will certainly do it.”

Suga puts up his hands, turning his head nervously. “Keep your voice down,” he hisses.

“Why?” Naprem asks, loudly. The guards are paying attention again, peering over from their posts around the yard. “Are you afraid of what might happen if someone were to overhear us? Because ideation is nothing in comparison to the real thing. You have never faced the real thing.”

“And you have, is that it?”

Naprem flushes with anger, hands curling into fists as she leans into his personal space. “Yes,” she says. “I have.”

His disbelieving look stokes her rage to the full. “You people have no idea,” she says, shaking with anger. “You think this is the worst it could ever be.” She jabs her thumb at her scar, watching his nostrils flare with distaste. “At the camp I came from, this was Cardassian mercy. I saw them shoot men for less than you and I have already done. I saw our people fight back and lose, over and over and over. I saw the monsters the Cardassians can be if they’re given the proper motivation and the proper tools, and I never want to see it again. I understand you’re angry,” she says, and he turns his head, refusing to look at her. “I’m angry, too. But unlike you, I know the real cost of what you’re asking for. I know the stakes. I know what this could turn into. If we give them a reason to turn Zarpek into Rize, they’ll do it. And if we turn against one another, they’ve already won.”

Suga’s quiet for a moment, his lips pressed tight into a long, thin line. Naprem folds her arms again, looking away, and most of the guards do the same, seeming to assume they’re having a domestic dispute.

She’s almost ready to go inside without him again, sure he’s not going to dignify her with a response, when he finally speaks again, voice low.

“Eri came back with...wounds,” he confesses. “Deep cuts on her back, barely healed. They interrogated her...rather aggressively, it seems.”

“They were sending a message,” Naprem says, softly.

Suga shakes his head.

“We have to be willing to sacrifice,” he says. “If we aren’t willing to sacrifice anything, we won’t make any progress.”

“My willingness isn’t in question. But if we’re more willing to sacrifice than we are to strategize and to adapt, then sacrifice is all we’ll do,” Naprem tells him.

“There are things in this life worth sacrificing for. There are things worth that pain.”

“I agree. But enduring that pain without good reason doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t further your cause. It just hurts.”

Suga frowns deeper. He doesn’t say anything more for a while -- he just stares out at the ocean, handsome face twisted with bitterness. After a moment, Naprem lets herself follow his gaze. The stars have come out, dotting the purple sky, dappling it with shards of silver.

She’s getting lost in the night sky when Suga’s calm voice interrupts her reverie: “You can see the Denorios belt tonight.”

Sure enough, she looks to the east and finds it, a blooming electric pink watercolor just beyond the shrinking shape of Derna. It sparkles and billows like a veil in the night sky, the stormy Eye of the Prophets, threatening to shed another tear for Bajor and her children.

“It’s so bright,” she says, and Suga nods, slowly.

“Likely an ionic storm,” he says. “A disturbance of cosmic proportions, ionic charged particles traveling at thousands of kilometers an hour -- dangerous for spacefarers. But incredibly beautiful from afar.”

“I’ve read about them,” Naprem says. “Most experts believe that’s what stranded Kai Taluno there.”

“It’s certainly possible. To a man of his time, I can imagine that he described the event in the most accurate language he had available.”

“The history agrees with you,” Naprem says. She shakes her head a little, gazing up at that flickering spot of paint on the horizon. “During the First Republic, the sailors would navigate by it. They’d point their lightships towards it -- long before we had sophisticated observational equipment or fully understood the science, we were drawn to it. Before we had the language to describe what it was, or how it acted, we wanted to experience it for ourselves.”

“Like children,” Suga replies, voice soft with wonder. “Stumbling around in the dark.”

Then, after a long silence, he continues where he left off: “We must be brave, Naprem. That is the only way forward through the darkness.”

Naprem fights to tame her anger, which whips up again inside her chest in an instant, hungry as a firestorm. “I am no coward, Ede. But to enter into the unknown without the proper tools is to invite disaster, and you know it. No explorer who’s still living ever went out into the wilderness without a purpose, a plan, and the knowledge necessary to improvise, if they had to.”

Suga stares up at the stars, quiet. Naprem tries to quiet the roar inside her, too.

“You're a man of science, Ede,” she says. “I know you know I'm right.”

He nods, finally, and sighs.

“I do,” he says. “You usually are.”

“I need you to trust me,” Naprem says.

“I'm trying,” he says, turning to regard her with a strange, plaintive shine. “It terrifies me to ever think I can't.”

“You can. You know you can.”

“I don’t. Not always.” He purses his lips, face puckering with shame and doubt. “You trust too easily.”

“I don’t.”

“You do,” Suga insists. “You’re easily taken in by the appearance of kindness. And I don’t fault you for it, but--” He sighs. “I get desperate and… something comes over me. Something I've never felt before. I'd do anything to be free of this, Naprem. This place, this… subordinate existence. And when I think you're not with me…”

“I am with you.” She steps closer, and he seems reassured by the raw determination in her face. “But just ‘anything’ won't get you free of this. If the punishments are getting more severe, the Cardassians are getting more agitated. We’re going to a lot of effort to draw attention to ourselves and at the moment, I'm not sure what for. We need a plan. We need to approach the situation carefully. Because every time we don't, it's going to cost us -- and we don't have much more they can take from us.”

Suga turns his head, looking down at the waves crashing below, seeming to process what she's said. He sighs.

“Eri’s capture hasn't been good for morale. The girls are angry. They want to do something but they don't know what.”

“So we’ll give them something to do. But for now, I think we can both agree it's best to wait until that ‘something’ can be something meaningful.”

Suga watches the ocean for a while but finally, just before the siren for lights out, he nods.

“Alright,” he says. “Alright.”

“Return to your bunks!” a guard shouts at them from across the courtyard.


	5. Ants All Together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Naprem gets to know Dr. Ovig better. Suga struggles to contain his disapproval as, all around them, things get worse.

**Zarpek Fishery, Yynys, Bajor – Spring, 2329**

* * *

 

Naprem is hoping for a bit of peace and quiet after that -- a few uneventful weeks to get morale back, at the least. But the very next day at roll call, Zevat stops beside them when she’s doing rounds.

“Toras,” she says, reading from her PADD. “You’re on special assignment today. Wait here until I’m available to give you instruction.”

Uru and Onea both look to Naprem for answers, but she has none. It’s early, and she’s tired. She’s never heard of anyone receiving special assignments, but then, it isn’t as if she’s asked. They’re forced to stand in their spots, watching as the rest of the congregation moves off to their stations. Naprem feels strangely self conscious about it -- people stare at them as they pass, as though they’ve done something wrong. Naprem tries not to linger on the last time she and her aunts were singled out like this in the center of a courtyard. She’s sure Uru does it for her, anyway.

Zevat walks back over to them, gait measured, unharried. Uru shrinks into Onea as she gets closer -- Zevat looks up from her PADD to find her cowering and frowns.

“What are you doing?” she asks, wrinkling her nose.

“She’s frightened,” Naprem tells her.

“I didn’t ask you,” Zevat says, frowning deeper. She looks back at Uru, face creased with utter consternation. “Stop that.”

“Are we in some sort of trouble?” Onea asks, raising her chin.

“You’re about to be, if you keep speaking out of turn.”

Onea sniffs, haughtily. Zevat squints at them, like she can’t possibly understand why they’re acting this way, and perhaps she can’t, Naprem thinks. A sinoraptor can’t naturally sympathize with a mouse. They see the world from different heights.

“Dr. Ovig’s requested you,” Zevat says. “He’s setting up a clinic that will operate out of the security checkpoint. You’re going to work with him to prepare the space.”

“For how long?” Naprem asks.

“For as long as he needs you,” Zevat says, giving Naprem a sharp look. “I’m warning you, Tora.”

Naprem ducks her head obediently to show that she doesn’t intend to interrupt anymore. Zevat shakes her head a little, crest flicking with annoyance.

She leads them to the security checkpoint in single file. Though they’ve lived here for months, the checkpoint still feels like unfamiliar territory: a short, single-story building standing between them and the outside world. Naprem’s never ventured that close to it again, since passing through -- it’s heavily surveilled, and well-guarded by ten of the meanest-looking guards the camp has to offer. They each nod to Zevat as she passes them by, eyeing Naprem and her aunts with suspicion.

They enter through the sliding doors of the checkpoint, and turn down a hall near the requisitions counter. Three doors down, Ovig Yaien is standing in a small, barren room lit with a single ceiling light, which casts the entire room in dreary blues. His face lights up on sight of them.

“Ladies!” he says, clearly trying to remain pleasant despite his nervousness. “Good morning. Welcome. It’s so good to see you all again.”

Zevat ushers them in and turns her head. She jerks her chin and another guard comes down the hall.

“On the door,” she tells the other guard. “Watch them. Don’t interfere unless you need to.”

“By your order, sir,” says the guard, and walks past the entrance to the room to stand against the wall near the doorway.

Zevat looks back at Naprem.

“Don’t make trouble,” she says.

“When have I ever?” Naprem asks.

Zevat stares at her, then turns her head and lets out a long-suffering sigh.

Ovig Yaien interrupts them, tiptoeing up like a nervous songbird. “Er, Glinn Zevat,” he says, “if you please, I-- I really must insist-- The lighting situation is… well it’s just… I can’t really see with only the one--”

“Ovig,” Zevat says. “This is the space. You want it?”

“Er, yes.”

“Then this what you’re getting,” Zevat says. “Make it work. Stop wasting my time.”

Then, she turns on her heel and marches down the hall without another word. Dr. Ovig purses his lips and wrings his hands, looking around at them apologetically.

“She’s such a character, isn’t she?” he says, his voice weak. He sighs. “Well. That’s that. We’ll have to make do.”

“‘That’s that’?” Onea asks, shocked at him. “What do you mean, ‘that’s that’? You need more light! Keep asking!”

“Now, now,” Ovig says, but then Uru chimes in, too.

“I really can’t see a thing in here, Doctor,” she says. “I don’t know how you can possibly operate under these conditions.”

“No way around it,” he says. “I suppose I’ll just have to bring a few lamps from home.”

It takes a moment to fully register, and after that Naprem is left staring, feeling -- irrationally -- like she's just been punched in the chest.

She'd wonder if it's just her, but Uru and Onea go still too, and she can feel the words ringing through the air like an unexpected slap.

Home. Tonight, Ovig Yaien will leave this camp and go _home_.

The good doctor seems to realize what he's said only after he realizes they're all staring.

“Oh, heavens,” he gasps, full cheeks flushing with embarrassment. “I-- How entirely thoughtless of me.” He looks well and truly distressed, a little frantic to dispel the air of discomfort. “I apologize, goodness, I apologize. What a cruel thing of me to say.”

“It's alright,” Naprem says, not feeling at all like it is.

He seems to sense her insincerity, but simply nods, as though determined to put it behind them.

The morning continues in this way, littered with stumbling blocks. Onea and Uru labor diligently to smooth the creases of tension that insinuate themselves into the air between them, and Naprem does as she's told. Ovig, for all his awkwardness, is as kind as ever, and chatters away, equal parts nervous and eager to please. But the inequity between them is as everpresent as a stain.

* * *

 

A guard brings them their midday meal, and they sit out in the hall to eat it.

“Do you mind if I ask,” Ovig starts, haltingly. “That is to say -- you three have been interned here since winter, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir,” Naprem says.

“And how long before then?”

“Since the beginning,” Naprem says. “We were arrested a few days after the Annexation.”

Ovig’s friendly face goes pale and she sees him swallow, thickly, in a way that has nothing to do with food. He shakes his head, looking almost ill. “Heavens,” he says. “Heavens, I can't possibly imagine.”

Naprem looks at him -- her instant, overwhelming instinct is to agree that he probably can't, and the callousness of it shocks her. Internally, she harshly chastises herself; Ovig has been nothing but kind to her. It's hardly his fault he's avoided arrest thus far, and simple jealousy is no justification to treat him unfairly.

And yet, she can't help but be overwhelmed by the injustice of it all. Just this morning, she'd thought herself nearly content -- calm in the face of her circumstances. Now, her temper billows like the sky before a storm. Home, she thinks. When they finish their work tonight, when the lights out siren sounds -- Ovig Yaien will go home .

“It isn't an experience I'd wish on anyone,” she says, just before her silence has outstayed it's welcome. “You're very fortunate, Doctor.”

“It isn't doctors who need fortune,” Ovig says, ruefully. “It's our patients.”

“Mm,” Onea grunts from Naprem's side. “Well said.”

“You three are originally from Musilla, aren't you?” Ovig asks.

“We are,” Onea says, gesturing between herself and Uru. “Naprem is from Eastern Province, near Delriko.”

“Eastern Province?” Ovig exclaims with naked interest. “Really? Oh, I should've known -- you have the slightest accent! I've been struggling all this time to place it.”

“Do I?” Naprem feels her cheeks flush with age-old embarrassment. “I can't hear it, myself.”

“Oh, just the slightest bit of one,” he says, reassuringly. “My mother’s family was native to Eastern Province -- goodness, is there anywhere on Bajor more beautiful? The cloud forests, the Crystal Pools… It's like living poetry. Like stepping into a painting. I've always wanted to go back, but with things as they are now… ah, well.” He shakes his head, longing and disappointment rife in his kind face. “I used to think Eastern Province was blessed. I still think that.”

Naprem feels herself smile despite her resonant heartbreak.

“I do too, Doctor.”

He smiles back at her, and she swallows and fights not to avert her eyes, wishing more than anything that the blessings of Eastern Province felt closer -- as much a part of her as her gilded speech, instead of something as far and inaccessible to her as the days of her childhood.

They return to work when they're finished with their meal, rummaging and organizing and cleaning. The office is claustrophobically tight, but at least the company isn't abhorrent; Onea and Ovig seem to have a shared vision of how it ought to look, what the aesthetic ought to evoke, and Uru and Naprem simply follow their lead. Ovig chatters on, explaining his plans and desires.

“Obviously, I'm still struggling to cultivate a… well, a sense of trust here,” he says. “But you three have been so helpful, and-- well, the Cardassians have at least provided me with what I'll need. Their technology is really just incredible; I'll have to show it to you, Doctor Tora, just as soon as the order comes in… they have a device that can -- painlessly! -- remove scar tissue. Can you believe that?”

“Hardly,” Onea scoffs. “Sounds like black magic to me.”

“I had to see it for myself,” Ovig agrees. “But--oh, what technology!” He looks over at Naprem, arranging a file drawer. “I'm sure if I got permission, I could even help you with that abrasion on your eyebrow, Miss Tora.”

Naprem feels something curl in her stomach, something hard and cold.

“I'm afraid I'd have to refuse,” she says, carefully. “As befits my station.”

“Your station?” Ovig asks. Then, he seems to realize. “Prophets,” he gasps. “You're ih’valla?”

The aunts seem surprised by his reaction. Onea sits up from where she's working in the corner. “Obviously!” she barks. “What else would we be?”

Ovig’s plump cheeks flush with color. “Why, I couldn't possibly presume to say -- it's-- well, I suppose it'd be very unseemly for me to assume that you couldn't be, I do apologize--”

“Did you think I took up traditional medicine for my health?” Onea scoffs. “In violation of the d’jarra? I am no village mystic, boy! I'll have you know, I'm quite well respected in my field!” She wags her finger, pontificating.

“And I meant you no insult!” Ovig cries. “Please, please forgive me, I only--” He turns to Naprem, as though she's going to help him out of this. “I couldn't believe that such a horrible fate could befall the most blessed among us.”

Naprem smiles. Every part of her wants to scream.

“Yes,” she says, in a voice too pleasant to even approximate something natural. “Well. The Prophets bring strange blessings, these days.”

Ovig looks around at the three of them, his nervousness palpable. He looks down and clears his throat.

“Well,” he says, cadence blocky and uneven, “I suppose if I hadn't deduced it from your profession, Miss Onea, I should have deduced it from your good manners. I apologize.”

This somehow makes Naprem even angrier. “Really?” she asks. “Ih’valla aren't particularly known for our good manners.”

“I think you alone could testify to that,” Uru scolds her.

Ovig is beginning to sweat with nervousness. “Truly, I do apologize, I don't mean to imply--”

“What?” Naprem asks, and she knows she's being unkind. She can't help it. The insult is too great.

Fortunately, Ovig simply loses his voice altogether. He turns his face away, ashamed. Naprem grinds her teeth and returns to organizing the shelf in front of her, angry at him and, now, at herself as well. The whole room simmers in awkward silence. She sees Uru and Onea share a look from the corner of her eye. She burns with shame and tarnished pride.

“I simply didn't realize they'd have the gall,” Ovig says, softly, surprising her. She'd stopped expecting him to respond. “I never imagined the government would allow the Cardassians to get away with it.”

“Well the government has found me quite a nuisance for a while, so I'm sure it was actually quite a relief when someone offered to make me disappear.”

Ovig chances a shy look over his shoulder at her. She pretends not to notice.

“If I may ask,” he says, “why were you arrested?”

She wants to say that, in fact, he may not ask, because isn't it bad enough that it's her fault they're all here to begin with? Isn't it bad enough that he will go home tonight and she will not? That this is her home now, this strange dimension where she is less a person than he, where she is less entitled to kindness and to comfort? What right does he have to ask her such questions, she wonders?

(She's not sure why this has come over her all at once. She feels needlessly cruel, but she can't help it. Her anger directs her now. Ovig’s naïve curiosity feels like the greatest insult she's ever been asked to endure.)

She finally speaks after a long, terse silence, the words like cold rocks in her mouth.

“When I was forced to choose between justice and comfort,” she says, “I chose justice.”

There's an echoing silence thereafter. It's long enough that Naprem begins to wish she'd said nothing at all.

“You're a very brave woman,” Ovig says, gently.

Naprem turns her head to give him a joyless smile. “Yes, well. We see where that's gotten me.”

This time, it's Ovig who looks away, face creased with a sadness Naprem can't help but see.

Onea and Uru stand there, looking first at one another, and then at Naprem and Ovig. Finally, Onea steps in to interrupt the strained silence that's settled over the room.

“Oh, for heavens’ sake,” she says, hands on her hips. “We’re all Collaborators as far as the Cardassians are concerned.”

“Auntie!” Naprem says, shocked that she'd use the word directly in front of him like that.

“No!” Onea says. “I've had enough. We’re all here now, aren't we? What does it matter how we got here? This is life, now. We can spend our time making each other miserable, or we can spend our time helping each other, but we can't do both. So pick your side, my girl, because I'd like to get on with my day.”

Naprem feels her cheeks flood with color and her blood burn with embarrassment. She feels well and truly scolded, mortified by her own behavior, by her own holier-than-thou attitude. Even if he goes home tonight, Ovig is as captive as she is, a slave on his own planet, in his own factory. And still, in spite of that, he's here, isn't he? He's here, trying to help.

She's becoming Suga, she thinks with alarm.

“Dr. Ovig,” she says, properly abashed. “Please excuse me, I apologize. I-- truly, I don't know what came over me to speak to you that way.”

“Oh, please,” Ovig says in a whoosh of breath. “Please Miss Tora, don't apologize. I find it highly inappropriate that you apologize for my cowardice.”

He takes another uneven, whooshing breath -- his words appear to leave him winded. But he goes on, his plump cheeks ruddy pink.

“My father -- you know he forbade me to be a doctor. Unsuitable for a man of my station, he said. And I told him, you know -- I told him I had no interest in business or merchantry, that I wanted to dedicate myself to the study of medicine, that I wanted to-- to help people, and he already had my brother to run the factory, and he did it so brilliantly, and so I thought what could possibly be the harm? But I was Mi’tino, and that was that.”

He seems to say this all in one breath, as though he's been waiting to for a very long time and is now fearful of being interrupted before he can finish his confession.

“So I studied in secret. Four years of night school, and then I found a doctor in town who agreed to take me as his apprentice -- all in secret, mind you -- and during the day I was dutiful, and I helped run the factory. I did the books all day and at night I'd go into town and work at the clinic, and now -- well, now I don't know how I managed, I was so frightened of my father and so exhausted, I nearly stopped sleeping altogether, but those midnight hours -- being able to stop a baby crying, or stop a man from bleeding -- being able to do real good -- oh, it brought me fulfillment like I'd never felt before in my life. And I thought -- you know, I thought, surely I'm meant to do this. Surely the Prophets gave me life to do this.”

“You defied the d’jarra?” Uru asks, scandalized.

“Oh, yes,” Ovig says, almost breathless now, as though telling this sordid tale is rigorous exercise. “I couldn't help it, you see -- it was never my intention to practice heresy, but medicine -- medicine was my calling. I felt… you know, perhaps I'd simply been born to the wrong family by mistake, or -- or perhaps -- perhaps there'd simply been a… misunderstanding. Why else would I receive so urgent a calling? It must have been the Prophets’ intent that I be so… driven. It must have been their plan that I defy the d’jarra.”

“No Prophet would have such a plan!” Uru declares.

Naprem, though, feels almost full with wonder.

“What of your father?” she asks, softly, and at this Ovig’s odd exhilaration seems to deflate.

“Well,” he begins. “That is to say-- ...last year, before all the trouble started, he had a stroke, and soon after became very ill. I thought -- well, he was a proud man, you see, and very humiliated to be laid so low, and so I thought, perhaps I might spare him the attention of another stranger, and also that I might -- well, that I might show him the truth, and that perhaps he might be swayed of a demonstration of my-- well, at least, of all that I had learned.”

Naprem knows from his tone what he's thinking now: how foolish he was to hope, to think that everything might turn out alright. She knows it because she's thought the same thing a hundred thousand times since this all began. How naïve she was to hope for the best. How silly she was to be optimistic.

“He vowed to disown me. He said it was my fault he had grown so ill -- that the Prophets had sought to strike him down for my insolent behavior. Even now, I don't think I've ever been regarded with such hatred.”

If Uru agrees with Ovig’s father, she's too kind to voice it now.

“It wasn't your fault,” Naprem says, gently.

“Oh, I can't know that,” Ovig says. “No one can. But I can't help who I am, can I? I'm a doctor. I've always been. What way is there around that?”

He shakes his head.

“I think my courage died with my father,” he says. “I don't know that I have a single ounce of courage left within me.”

Naprem finds herself reaching across the room to catch him by the hand. She squeezes gently, hoping to impart some manner of reassurance.

“In such trying times,” she says, “it takes great courage even to live.”

Ovig squeezes back, and Naprem feels relieved that she at least knows how to properly apologize.

* * *

 

It's days before Naprem is able to relay all this to Suga -- both because she can't decide whether or not she should, and because the preparation of the clinic keeps them apart. It's days before they can meet again, as they usually do, and since she and her aunts eat their midday meals with Ovig, she can not even pass messages to him then. They’re reunited some three days later, and in her excitement, she finds it bursting out of her all at once.

“He violated the d’jarra?” Suga looks surprised but -- to Naprem's disappointment -- seems otherwise unmoved. “Interesting. I never imagined he'd have the strength of will to attempt such a thing.”

“That's all you have to say?” Naprem tries to keep the reproach out of her voice as she walks beside him in the yard. Spring is finally alive in the air. It’s comfortably warm and fragrant even in the fading twilight. “I expected more of a reaction.”

Suga gives her a curious look. His face is more weatherbeaten than usual, tan skin reddened by the sun. Spring has brought giddy coastal winds gusting up through the camp around midday, and swept the sky perpetually clear -- all of the climbers are now permanently flushed, their tans growing darker by the day.

“What sort of reaction would that be?”

Naprem scoffs with surprise. “A few months ago you would've been proud of a man like Dr. Ovig. We would've been enticing him to join the cause.”

This time it's Suga’s turn to scoff, but he does so more out of sadness than haughtiness.

“Yes, I suppose you're right.” He sighs, shakes his head. “Recently, I confess… I've begun to fear that all that effort may have ultimately gone to waste.” He looks out at the horizon. “It all seems so far away now. Who can worry about the d’jarra in a world like this?”

Naprem frowns, simultaneously agreeing with him and feeling a bit resentful that he doesn't find Ovig’s story moving, as she did. “People find a way to worry about all sorts of petty things, even under the most dire of circumstances.”

Suga sighs, as though the thought depresses him. “Perhaps we do. Nowadays, I find pettiness is often all we have by which to distract ourselves.”

Naprem lifts her eyebrows, truly shocked at him now.

“Ede,” she says. “Are you alright?”

He waves her off. “It's nothing, my dear. That is to say -- nothing has happened since last we spoke. I fear I'm simply...languishing. I can't conjure the energy you can in the face of such hopelessness.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

This question, though, seems to irritate him. “What do I mean?” he asks. “I mean that we are lost. Eri’s wounds have not yet closed, and the Cardassians force her to work, still. The girls are miserable -- hopes dashed, spirits crushed -- and they turn to me for ideas I do not have. We continue to do nothing, just as you have advised, and so our circumstances press down upon us until we are forced to reckon with the fact that there is no end in sight. We have only suffering to look forward to, and not a single plan for how to stop it.”

Naprem pulls back from him, wounded. His words accost her.

“Certainly, you do not blame me for--”

But in an instant he's cut her off. “Certainly not,” he says, firmly, and he reaches out to grip her shoulder before she can get too far from him. Her defensiveness freezes and folds in her chest.

“Certainly not,” he continues. “What could we do now? No, you've given me sound advice. You always do. I simply--” He shakes his head. “I think we find ourselves in a new world now, my dear. And I know not what the rules are, nor how we ought to proceed.”

He releases her, and looks back out at the sea. Naprem moves closer to him, following his gaze.

“Those who would've been our allies are now our enemies,” Suga says. “There's no way around that. The petty things that once dominated our world are irrelevant now.”

Naprem has a feeling that will be his final word on the subject.

“...you ought to at least let Dr. Ovig take a look at Eri’s wounds,” she says, finally. “Even if you don't like him, he is a doctor.”

“She can make her own choice,” Suga says, bitterly, and Naprem resolves to say nothing more about it.

* * *

 

Of course, that’s a far easier resolution to keep before she lays eyes on Eri’s wounds for herself.

She doesn’t until a few days later in the yard after work. Eri’s face is still black and blue. She looks exhausted, eyes puffy, and Naprem soon learns through the grapevine that it's because her slow-healing back opens at the slightest provocation, and the pain is so great that it often leaves her in tears. Naprem sees this happen only once -- at midday, Eri drops her spoon and bends to retrieve it, only a burst into tears as a spasm of pain goes through her -- and seeing it once is enough. She leaves her aunts to find Zevat, feeling something inside her boil over.

“Are you a sadist?” she asks when she finds her outside Warehouse 6.

Zevat doesn't look up from her padd -- Naprem grabs it and jerks it down.

“Are you a sadist?” she repeats. “Is that what it is?”

Zevat grabs her by the wrist and whirls her around to pin it to her back. She restrains her with one hand.

“Are you going to answer me?” Naprem snaps, and Zevat squeezes her wrist tight enough to make her wince.

“I answer inquiries,” Zevat says, flatly. “Not demands.”

“Are you a sadist, Glinn Zevat? Do you revel in the suffering of others?”

“Not particularly.”

Naprem’s voice is tinged with disbelief. “And what do you call this then?”

Zevat keeps her hold secure on Naprem's wrist. “This is how I deal with insubordination. You don't touch me, or any of my property. Ever. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” Naprem mutters through her teeth.

“What was that?”

“Yes,” Naprem snarls. “Now, unhand me.”

“Are you ready to be civilized?”

“Am I ready to be-- Your people beat a woman half to death for throwing a tantrum, and you think I'm uncivilized?”

“It wasn't you, was it?”

“What do I care if it wasn't me?! It easily could have been!”

Zevat releases her with a careful shove. Naprem stumbles, but easily recovers. When she turns to look at her, Zevat is staring back, expression deadpan as always, brows low. And all at once, Naprem is struck with the realization that, yes -- it could have been. It could have been her.

“They beat her,” she says, voice shaking. “They left lesions on her back so deep they won't heal. They didn't need to do anything like that, she was no threat to them! She hurt no one with that protest! She went quietly!”

“I know,” Zevat says.

“Then why? ”

“I'm not the end of the line,” she says. “Zuvun is.”

Naprem feels as though she might be about to combust. Zevat looks back down at her past as though that's the end of it, returning to her work.

“Encourage your friend to make use of the clinic,” she says. “That's what it's for. If she won't go, then it's not my problem.”

“What are we supposed to do?” Naprem asks. “Just… obey? Jump when you say jump? Do whatever you ask, no matter the peril? Bear whatever suffering you inflict on us in silence?”

“Not me,” Zevat says, as if it matters. “But yes. Ideally.”

“And if we don't? Then what?”

Zevat looks up.

“Then this is what's going to happen.”

Naprem's whole body is shaking now. She can feel the jitters in her stomach and her neck, down through her thighs, rattling her teeth.

“That's intolerable.”

“That's life.” Zevat turns back to her work. “Keep your head down and you'll be fine.”

But she won't be, Naprem knows. She walks away and something thuds inside her -- a ripe bonbi bouncing down a flight of stairs -- bruising, breaking, splattering. She walks around the corner of the warehouse, out of sight, and then she sinks down among the weeds, and begins to cry.

* * *

 

She knows from the beginning that any effort to convince Eri to visit the clinic will be made in vain. She does try, of course -- how could she not? -- but even as Eri dries her tears from her latest spasm of pain, she dismisses the possibility out of hand.

“Absolutely not,” she sniffles. “I wouldn't dream of being treated by that… Collaborator. ” She looks around, and when she catches Suga watching from over Naprem's shoulder, she turns her head and spits with a self-satisfied grin.

Onea does her best to help, but of course she can do little else but create salves and balms to soothe the pain. “We need to find a way to close her wounds,” she says to Naprem. “They're too deep.”

“They’ll close eventually, won't they?” Naprem asks. “Surely, they must.”

“They’ll scar over, perhaps. But that assumes I can keep them clean and sterile for that long and I'm not sure that I can.” She shakes her head, hair slipping in spindly threads from her braid. “Stubborn girl. What reason is there to refuse Dr. Ovig’s help but for the sake of her own pride? What pride do the dead have, hm?” Onea kicks angrily at the edge of their mat. “Damn stubborn, silly girl!”

She’s right to worry. They've long run out of clean bandages, and despite Onea’s best efforts, the wounds are growing puffy and red, oozing more than they bleed. But it's useless to try and convince Eri otherwise. Even as the pain makes her weep and tremble, she refuses. Soon, Naprem finds herself appealing to Suga, sensing that Eri is refusing help to impress him. But Suga dismisses her fears, claiming it's Eri’s decision alone.

“She's suffering, Ede, and she needn't be -- Dr. Ovig could help her, heal her!”

“To what end?” Suga asks, blithely. “So that she might be a more productive member of this gods’ forsaken labor mill?”

Naprem gapes at him. “So that she mightn’t be in excruciating pain for the rest of her life! And so that the rest of her life mightn’t be too short ! My aunt is doing everything she can, but we’re running out of options -- if Eri’s wounds get infected--”

“It won't come to that,” Suga interrupts.

“It will, Ede! Unless she gets some serious medical attention, it will.”

“Your aunt is a talented healer,” he says. “You should have some faith in her abilities.”

“I have a great deal of faith,” Naprem says, fighting her impulse to be offended. “But I also know how limited her resources are here. If Eri keeps reopening her wounds every few minutes, it won't matter how much faith I have -- and an infection in this environment could kill her.”

“Eri is a grown woman,” Suga sighs. “I can no more force her to visit the clinic than you can.”

But Naprem sees the way Eri looks at Suga -- the way they all look a him. She sees the way the girls crave his guidance and approval. Suga disdains Ovig Yaien’s existence, and so they do it too, hoping to earn his favor. His students are always this way; they always have that girlish, lovesick air to them. When she and Suga taught together at Dutan University, she noticed, but hardly minded his sway with his female students -- what did any of them risk but impropriety? But here, in matters of life or death, his blatant disregard for his own power over his students infuriates her, and every time she hears Eri whimper in pain, every time she smells her blood, she feels that fury stab deeper, like a river wearing a canyon away in the earth. She seethes. And as Eri’s wounds grow uglier, she feels herself getting desperate.

So, one day, she simply goes to consult Dr. Ovig herself.

She knows that, since it opened, the clinic has seen few visitors. But from the way Ovig reacts when she walks through the door, you'd think he'd had no patients whatsoever. He springs up from his seat, very nearly sending his midday meal to the floor in his excitement. Before she can stop him, he's spent a full five minutes regaling her, showing her the boxes of new equipment he received just this morning, each new toy shinier than the last. And then, just as suddenly as he began prattling away, he interrupts himself.

“Oh, it's so good to see you! Er-- well, wait-- oh, excuse my manners, I'm terribly sorry, are you alright? Sick? Injured? Forgive me my excitement, I'm sure this isn't a social call...”

“I'm alright,” she assures him, grateful for the opportunity to speak. “Actually, I'm here for a friend.”

She explains to him the dilemma -- gently, so as not to bruise his soft heart. But he clearly understands what she won't say.

“She won't be persuaded to see me.” He looks crestfallen, but resolved to it. “I should have known. I told them as much before we set up this place, but. Well.” He smiles a smile that says what they're both thinking. That strained, exasperating reality: Cardassians.

“I don't know if Eri’s personal objections can take precedent at times like these,” Naprem says.

“Oh, Miss Tora, they must!” Ovig shakes his head, a passionate look on his face. “A doctor must work with a patient's consent -- people must be allowed to make their own decisions about their bodies.”

Naprem stares, shocked at him. “This is a matter of life and death, Doctor!”

“Oh, I don't disagree,” he says. “But surely, those are the choices which it is most vital that people make for themselves. If she objects to the procedure--”

“It's you she objects to,” Naprem tells him, and it hurts to say.

He sighs, looking defeated. “Yes,” he says. “I suppose you're right.”

“Doctor,” she says. “This is a young woman in the prime of her life -- she is among the closest things to students I still have. If she dies from something preventable for no other reason than pride… it will consume me.”

Ovig purses his lips, brows knit.

“Perhaps,” he says, and he stands, slowly, almost as if he's in a trance. He moves away from her, through the rows of boxes, many of them unpacked, to a kit that rests on his small examination table. He lifts out a small black device the length of his hand -- he turns it over in his hands as he walks back towards her.

“Perhaps,” he says, and his voice is much quieter now. He sits down again and flicks the trigger of the device -- it lights up and hums, light gliding over his skin. He looks up at Naprem and points to her eyebrow, mouth open to continue.

Naprem realizes what he's thinking and stops him saying it with a hand on his knee. She's suddenly hyperaware of the guard standing outside. Her heart pounds in her chest.

A dermal regenerator. Brand new. State of the art. Faster and quieter than stitches. Small, portable. Easy to hide. Easier than trying to coerce Eri to come to the clinic.

“Doctor,” she whispers, haltingly. “Perhaps if you were to...misplace it.”

Ovig stares at her. She swallows -- she sees his hands shaking. If the Cardassians find out, what will become of them? If Eri finds out where this came from, what will she do?

All at once, Ovig’s hand seizes up. The regenerator drops into his lap and then, quietly, to the floor.

Naprem holds his gaze as she bends to pick it up. She sits up and bites her lip, carefully hiding it under her clothes.

“I--” He knits his brow. “I'm sorry I can't be more helpful to you, Miss Tora.”

She makes her way out of his office, head down, pulse racing, to the sound of the end-of-meal siren. The guard doesn't even glance her way as she hurries past.

* * *

 

Now, the real trouble begins. Healing Eri out in the open at midday is out of the question, but they no longer share a bunk, so healing her past lights out is also a non-option. Naprem and Eri rarely socialize after work, so any meeting then will surely be suspicious to anyone who pays attention. Besides that, there's nowhere to hide in the courtyard except behind the warehouses, and the guards are sure to come after them if they hide there.

She really should have thought this through, but there's no time to turn back now -- every second she has the regenerator on her increases the chances she'll be caught. If she doesn't think of something soon, all this will be for naught anyway. She's already missed her chance to confer with anyone at midday. She's out of ideas, and the situation needs an injection of new thought; so she does the only thing she can think to do. As they're headed out of the factory, sheltered by the cacophony of noise -- she tells her aunts.

“You did what?! ” says Uru.

“Clever girl,” says Onea.

And then it's a matter of quickly rehashing their options -- or lack thereof -- and hoping they'll come up with something she hasn't already.

“Well, what about Professor Suga?” Onea asks. “He could get it done, couldn't he?”

“Everyone knows you two meet after hours,” Uru agrees. “It wouldn't look any more suspicious than it already does.”

“What in heavens do you mean by that?” Naprem asks.

“Just ask him,” Uru says. “Surely, he'll be willing if you ask. Just convince him.”

“What convincing could it possibly take?” Onea asks. “Does he care about Eri or doesn't he?”

“Go,” Uru says to Naprem. “Hurry, before lights out.”

And she does -- once they're outside, she spots Suga from across the courtyard and hurries, as surreptitiously as possible, to join him.

“Well, good evening then,” he says. His skin is shiny from another day spent in the spring sunlight, and he smells strongly of the sea. “You're looking quite lively, Professor.”

“Thank you,” Naprem replies, not sure if she ought to take that as a compliment. “May I speak with you?”

He laughs. “Aren't we already?”

She looks at the crowd of men accumulating on the cliffside over his shoulder -- it's early, and the climbers are still retiring from the ropes, scaling the cliff face for one last time to rest, chatting amicably amongst themselves.

“I meant privately,” she says.

Suga’s handsome face grows serious. He nods.

“Of course.” He stands, getting a look over his shoulder at his compatriots. Without asking, he places his hand at the small of her back and guides her away. “What is it?” he asks, once they're out of earshot.

Naprem feels tongue-tied, distracted by the uninvited touch. “I--” She turns to him, trying to avoid being overheard and to loose his hand from her back without being rude. “What if I told you I'd found a way to heal Eri? Quickly? Without risk of infection?”

“I’d accuse you of witchcraft,” he says.

“I'm serious.” She tries very hard not to look suspicious. “I have...a dermal regenerator.”

“ What?! ” Suga exclaims, and then he grits his teeth, clearly angry at himself. He looks around. The guards pay them no mind. “Where did you--how? ”

“I asked,” she hisses. “You'd really be amazed what you can get by asking.”

Suga stares at her.

“Ovig gave you that,” he says.

“In a sense,” she says.

“And in what sense would that be?”

“In the sense that I have it and he knows I have it, and if the Cardassians find out I have it--”

“Yes, yes,” Suga says, shaking his head, “I get it.” He drums his fingers against her side and she steps away from him, unable to ignore her discomfort any longer. Suga hardly seems to notice, deep in thought. “You want me to take care of it after lights out, is that it?”

“That would certainly be ideal.”

“And you assume this-- thing, whatever it is -- you assume it works? Goodness, darling, you are naive--”

“Ede!” Naprem flushes with embarrassment, shocked at him.

“Did he show you that it worked?”

“He didn't have the chance!”

“I'm sure he didn't.” Suga shakes his head, vibrating with anger and disgust. “You're so trusting-- no, don't apologize, I know it's only in your nature--”

“I wasn't going to apologize!” she snaps.

“That man works for the Cardassians!”

“We all work for the Cardassians!”

“He does it willingly.”

“What difference does it make?”

“It makes all the difference!” Suga says, more loudly than he should. Several of the guards look over now, taking a growing interest, and Suga hunches his shoulders and starts walking. Naprem feels obliged to hurry after him, cheeks burning.

“This thing,” he mutters, “Whatever he's given you, it's clearly a fake. It's probably designed to make the problem worse.”

“Oh, how could it possibly?” Naprem snarls. “You haven't even seen the thing!”

“I don't need to,” he says, grimly. “He's tricked you, my dear. I don't know how else to put it.”

Naprem's face is so hot it hurts. Her cheeks feel heavy, blood coursing with anger and shame.

“What could he possibly hope to gain by that?” Her tone is more demanding than she means for it to be, but she can't help it -- he said he wouldn't do this again, wouldn't insult her intelligence, but here they are and he's doing it flagrantly. “What would be the point? Prophets, you're delusional , Ede!”

“Me?” Suga scoffs.

“You would rather concoct some...ridiculous conspiracy than save Eri’s life! You care more about your own pride than you care about any of us!”

“That is not true,” Suga snaps, and his face is electric with anger.

“Prove me wrong! Tell me one thing Dr. Ovig has done to imply that he has enough malice to trick me into killing my own student! Give me oneshred of evidence--”

“He sold us out!” Suga shouts. “Have you forgotten that?! He sold us like chattel, does that not speak definitively to the content of his character?!”

Now the entire courtyard is staring. Naprem's heart is galloping in her chest. One of the Cardassian guards leaning against the wall stands up, looking eager for whatever’s coming next. The workers are watching to, with the same attitude. Naprem sees the girls, clustered together, staring. She sees her aunts. She sees the workers from her old barracks and her new one. Off on her own, she swears she sees the woman from the riot, watching with baited breath. It makes her cheeks burn ever brighter, her breath coming in short, shallow bursts. She turns her head down, wishing she could turn invisible.

“What else can we do?” she asks, at a whisper. “What other options do we have? You wanted a plan, Ede, you wanted to do something -- I'm offering you that opportunity. I'm trying. What else is there? What else would you have me do?”

Suga stares at her, slowly catching his calm. Everyone is watching them, but he only looks at her, and she's no longer sure what to make of his expression. Is it contempt? Sadness? Is it her he distrusts?

“Why would he give you something so valuable?” he asks, finally. “He had no compassion for us when he gave up the factory. What did you have to do to earn his favor, Naprem?”

And just like that, Naprem's embarrassment is blown away by her rage -- her reproach for him.

“You always think the worst of me,” she whispers through her clenched teeth. “Why is that, Ede? What is it that makes you so suspicious of me? What have I ever done to garner your contempt?”

Suga looks at her, really looks at her, and after a moment, he shakes his head, an expression of wonder on his face.

“You're simply too extraordinary for me to believe.”

“That's no explanation at all.”

“It is the only one I have.”

They stand there, facing off, everyone standing around to bear witness to -- whatever it is that's happening. At last, Suga turns his head and sighs. He mumbles something out of the corner of his mouth.

“What was that?” Naprem asks, dreading the answer but too angry not to.

“I said, I'll take it if you can find a way to give it to me, but I think I've well and truly fouled up any chance of that.”

Naprem opens her mouth, but can find no reply. He's right -- he's called the most attention possible to them. There's not a chance she can hand it to him with everyone staring, waiting for them to come to blows. She looks down, shakes her head. She looks around and a courtyard full of strangers stares back at her. Their attention is unbearable.

Finally, she manages to meet Onea’s gaze from across the yard, and by some miracle, her aunt understands what she needs and pounces on Uru, who shrieks with surprise.

“Come here, you!” Onea cries, pulling her hair.

“Ah! Get off me!” Uru shouts.

“I've been holding this back one hundred and forty five years!” Onea hollers, pinching her cheeks and her ears. The guards growl with annoyance, turning to deal with this new ruckus, and in the moment that they're distracted, Naprem's hand darts to the hem of her pants. Suga holds out his hand and she puts the regenerator in it -- he pockets it just as the guards pull her aunts apart.

“Oh, it's all in good fun,” Onea says, blowing her hair out of her eyes.

“You bit me!” Uru says.

“What's a little lovebite between sisters?” Onea says. “Oh, put her down for heaven’s sake. We’ve resolved our differences, your job is done. Now I mean it, Licil -- you put her down or it's you I'm biting next.”

Licil releases Uru with a frown, and everyone else seems to get the idea. There's a tangible sigh as everyone turns back to what they were doing, disappointed that the excitement is over. By the time Naprem turns back to Suga, he's already gone, headed past the girls to the barracks. Onea and Uru catch up to her just as the lights out siren sounds.

“Don't ever say I didn't give you anything,” Onea says.

“Thank you, Auntie,” Naprem says, staring after Suga’s retreating back. “I don't know what we would've done without you.”

“Probably blown it,” Onea says. Somehow, that fails to make Naprem feel better.

* * *

 

After that, there's nothing left to do but wait. She feels sick from their argument, and sick with worry. Onea has to scold her to keep her from chewing her bottom lip, and still, her anxiety keeps her awake. Finally, close to midnight, Uru nudges her.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she says. “Come with me.”

Naprem knows what it sounds like when she’s about to get a talking to, but she welcomes the excuse to get up and exercise some of her nervous energy. Onea murmurs sleepily as they get up -- Uru leans over and pinches her cheek with an exasperated affection, and then they walk out into the aisle to speak with the guards.

The walk to the lavatory is painfully quiet. Uru always refuses to talk so close to the guards -- even their poor hearing won’t keep them from hearing when they’re but two feet from you. Only once they’re properly inside the washroom does Uru turn to her and speak, very softly:

“Now, I don’t claim to know what’s going on between you two, but if I didn’t know better, I’d think you and Professor Suga were ill at odds.”

Naprem flushes, and the weight of her sickness seems to intensify. Her stomach aches.

“We’re-- I don’t know what we are.” And she doesn’t. It feels like there’s something significant transpiring between them, but she doesn’t have a word for what it is -- clearly, their problem originates with Ovig. But does it? Can the enmity between them all truly be boiled down to, ‘I’ve befriended a man my colleague dislikes’? “It seems like we argue all the time now. He doesn’t trust my judgment, and I can’t… I hate being treated like I’m stupid.”

“Surely, he doesn’t mean to make you feel that way.”

“I don’t care what he means to do. He’s made it clear that he thinks I’m a poor judge of character, among many other things.”

“You and I know you’re not all that,” Uru murmurs, putting a hand on her arm -- Naprem realizes, belatedly, that she’s gotten a bit too loud. “You’re kind, Naprem, and you’re fair.”

“Thank you, auntie.” Her praise aches, somehow.

“I only… we have few friends here.” Uru purses her lips. “I only wish to remain friends with the ones we have.”

“I don’t know if that will be possible, if this keeps up.” But even saying it frightens her. What will life in Zarpek be without Suga? What will she do with no one to speak to in the evenings, no one to remind her that once, she was an intellectual, an academic, a revolutionary? Suga Ede has been her friend for almost ten years; a good friend, reliable. How many of those does she have? Can she truly afford to have one less?

“Naprem,” Uru says, and her disappointment only serves to make Naprem’s fears worse. “Professor Suga is under a great deal of stress.”

“So am I! So are we all!”

“Yes,” Uru says, “but at times like these, it’s essential to have… a little forgiveness for each other. A little sympathy.”

She squeezes Naprem’s arm.

“Just… be gentle. Use that kindness, won’t you? Don’t make too much out of nothing.”

After that, they make their way back to their mat in silence. Naprem lays down and Uru lays down beside her. It takes hours before she finally falls asleep, and then nightmares bite at her like flies.

* * *

 

Suga isn’t at roll call in the morning. Naprem knows because she looks for him. She’s tired, but anxiety curls inside her like a snake. She looks over to where the climbers assemble and his spot among them is empty. The girls, she quickly accounts for -- Jozke, Taya, Pama, and Eri, who looks more spritely than she has in days. But Suga is nowhere to be seen.

Zevat doesn’t say anything to her as the soldiers take attendance -- but before Naprem can head into the factory, she snags her by the elbow and pulls her aside.

“Your friend was caught with contraband last night,” Zevat says, without preamble.

“Good morning to you too,” Naprem says, even as her heart petrifies in her chest.

“Medical supplies,” Zevat continues, as though she said nothing at all. “He said he stole them. You know anything about that?”

“No,” Naprem says, but the guilt is thick on her tongue, and it makes the word come out weak.

“I know you paid a visit to Ovig yesterday.”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“You and Suga were seen arguing in the courtyard after hours.”

“I said I don’t know--”

Zevat’s grip on her arm tightens to the point of pain.

“Do you think I’m stupid?” she growls. Her well-kept row of headfeathers fans up in a dominance display. “Do I look damn stupid to you, Tora?”

“No,” Naprem says, but Zevat doesn’t seem to hear her.

“I am doing everything I can to help you,” she hisses. “How long do you think I can protect you when you pull this shit every other day?”

Naprem locks eyes with her.

“I’m not the only person who needs your protection,” she says. “And I never asked for it.”

Zevat stares at her, saying nothing. After a moment of terse silence, Naprem pulls her arm free and walks on. Her aunts are waiting for her by the door, looking almost as anxious as she feels.

“Who stepped in her slop this morning?” Onea asks.

“Ede’s been arrested,” Naprem says, voice shaking.

“What?! ” Uru looks aghast.

“I don’t know,” Naprem says, and she feels like she might faint. “They must have caught him with the regenerator -- he told them he stole it.”

“Why would he do a thing like that?” Uru asks. “They could kill him!”

“Keep your voice down,” Onea says, looking around with uncharacteristic suspicion. “What choice did he have? If he’d told them where it really came from, it’d be our girl on the chopping block.”

“Oh, Prophets,” Uru moans. “I can’t bear this.”

Naprem puts a hand to her chest. She can’t breathe. Why did she give him the regenerator? Why didn’t she just find a way to do it herself? He didn’t even want it, and now -- and after they’d had that stupid argument -- are those going to be the last words she ever says to him?

He’s protecting her. All their disagreements, and he’s protecting her still. Suga Ede is going to die and it’s going to be all her fault.

She moves through the turnstiles in a daze. Sterilization. Gloves. She finds her spot on the line and she’s dizzy. Onea and Uru stand on either side of her, propping her up.

“What is she?” a neighbor sneers. “Sick?”

“Yes,” Onea snaps, “she’s got a serious case of minding her own business. We’re hoping it’s contagious.”

Their neighbor scoffs dismissively, turning away, but then another voice chimes in.

“It’s guilt she’s sick with.”

Naprem looks up; on the other side of the conveyor belt stands the wiry-haired woman from the riot. The scar that mars her top lip cuts into her mouth as she smiles, ice cold, and Naprem couldn’t see her well yesterday in the yard; everything about her seems thinner, from her wrists to her hair. She stares at Naprem with such hunger and hatred that she reminds her of a sinoraptor cast out of its flock and left to starve.

“Professor Suga’s been arrested,” she continues. “Because of her. She reported him to the Cardassians.”

“No, I didn’t,” Naprem says, but her voice shakes. Unconvincing.

“We all know this woman is an opportunist!” the woman announces to the line. At the far end of the factory, the chains begin to rasp, towing the nets in. “A Collaborator! She consorts with the brothers Ovig -- with the Cardassian. Not even her closest friends are safe from her selfishness!”

Along the line, Naprem sees workers glancing at one another. She sees a few heads bob in agreement, a few hateful stares. She sees the Cardassians at the periphery, watching, waiting. And all at once, as the first flopping silver body appears in the nets, something inside Naprem bursts, coating her insides with white hot, molten indignation.

“Oh, shut up!” she says, loudly, and now, once again, she’s the center of attention. “Shut up, just-- shut up! I don’t know what your problem is with me, but if you can’t justify it with anything real, then I invite you to nurse that grudge in private. There are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to dislike me without propagating lazy, stupid lies, you-- fool! You ignoble coward!”

A few workers gape at her, shocked at her outburst. One ducks her head and coughs to disguise a laugh. But the woman from the riot only looks at her, shaking with contempt.

“You’re the liar,” she snarls. “You sold him out. I heard it!”

“You didn’t,” Naprem spits, and she’s mad as a hornet now. “Because that never happened.”

“It did!” the woman shouts. “You did it, I know you did it! You’re a traitor to the Bajoran people!”

“You’re the traitor!” Naprem shouts back. “You think picking fights with me, manufacturing whatever evidence you like -- you think that helpsanyone? You think the Cardassians care about your little -- delusions?! They’d kill me as soon as you! And all you’ve ever done is give them excuses -- you’re the opportunist! Can’t even pick a fight worth picking, but you’ll take any excuse to attack one of your own! You’ll make up your own excuses!”

“That’s enough!” Zevat shouts, voice booming from the back of the factory. “Get to work!”

But something in the woman’s gaze strikes like flint -- she lunges at Naprem, leaping at her across the conveyor belt, and the room erupts into chaos. Naprem ducks back, but not fast enough -- the woman tackles her to the ground and they scuffle, Naprem holding her back with a hand against her face. Uru screams, but it’s lost in the wave of noise, the clamor that rises around them like a tide. The woman bites her finger and Naprem elbows her hard in the side of the face. The woman skids off her and Naprem manages to get to her feet, but then the woman’s on her again, smashing her back against the moving conveyor belt. Her bony hands lock around Naprem’s throat. People are moving all around them, some straining to see the fight, some trying to get away. Naprem kicks the woman in the stomach, fighting to get free as the conveyor belt scrapes the back of her head. The woman keeps one hand tight around her throat and smashes her fist against Naprem’s face, her eyes and her mouth. Naprem tries to shield herself with her arms over her head, struggling to breathe, driving her heel into the woman’s bony pelvis. She loses her grip momentarily, grunting in pain, and Onea runs forward to grab her from behind. The woman throws her off just as Naprem sits up, and grabs her by the head, slamming it over and over into the conveyor belt. It feels like her brain has been jerked loose inside her head. Naprem punches her in the face as hard as she can, but when the woman’s hands slip, she tethers them around Naprem’s throat again.

Just as her vision’s going dark -- just as the woman’s skeletal fingers are scoring the sides of her neck -- a large, clawed hand descends as if from the heavens and grabs the woman by the hair. In an instant, she’s ripped back off of Naprem, and hurled to the floor. Zevat’s headfeathers stand straight up and she lets out a ferocious, otherworldly roar that makes the circle of rubberneckers cower. Naprem gasps and coughs, struggling to get upright on her own, and Zevat grabs her by the elbow and hoists her to her feet. She stumbles, dizzy. Her neck is wet with blood. The back of her head’s split open after being hammered against the conveyor belt.

The woman is on the floor. She pushes up onto her hands and knees, panting and shaking. When she looks up at Naprem through the curtain of her hair, her eyes are crazed.

“Stay down,” Zevat says, teeth bared.

It happens in slow motion. Like a bad dream, the woman from the riot stands -- wobbles. She doesn’t take her eyes off of Naprem. She’s mussed, disheveled. Her mouth hangs slightly open as she breathes. Her thin lips are slightly bloody, cheek bruising where Naprem punched her. Her eyes bulge, held wide open. She sways on her feet. Her bony knuckles are coated in a thin red sheen. She looks at Naprem, blind to everything else.

‘Suicide by Cardassian,’ as it will soon be known.

The woman lurches forward, rushing them. Zevat has her phaser out too fast to be seen. In a brilliant flash of light, the woman takes a blast to the chest and goes tumbling to the floor mid-stride.

The whole factory is quiet and still, but for the slow rasp of the nets, the whirr of the conveyor belts. Naprem stares at the woman on the ground, but she doesn’t move. A sea breeze sweeps through the open shutters, catching in the wiry tendrils of her hair.

Zevat holsters her weapon. Over her broad shoulder, Naprem can make out her expression -- mystified; closed; cold. Her feathered crest slowly goes limp, sinking back to lie flat along her head.

“...Tora,” she says, softly. “You’re on lockdown.” She jerks her chin towards the door. She never takes her eyes off the woman on the floor. “Go.”

Naprem looks at her, then back at the body lying still. Then, she steps away, walking slowly back towards the doors. Workers move away from her as she passes, giving her a wide berth, like she’s something toxic. She barely sees Uru and Onea, huddled together, watching her go. She’s numb with horror.

After a moment, Zevat follows after her.

“Back to work,” she says. “All of you.”


	6. Makes the Heart Sick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Naprem spends some time alone with her thoughts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's your reward for sitting through the reconfiguration of this fic: a brand new chapter! Which I can post! Because my chapters don't have to be 20k a piece now! Whee!
> 
> Seriously, thank you so much for everyone who's stuck with me so far. As some of you know, I was waffling on possibly deleting this fic, but now that I've reorganized it, I feel a lot better about it. Hopefully this will lead to more frequent updates but, for my own sanity, I'm not making any promises. ;p
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading and reviewing. It means the world to me. LLAP
> 
> A quick content warning: this chapter contains implied/referenced torture.

**Zarpek Fishery, Yynys, Bajor – Spring, 2329**

* * *

Zevat half-leads, half-follows her across the empty yard to the security checkpoint. It isn't what Naprem expects, but she accepts it - what can she do but accept it? She can barely breathe. She's still shaking, the back of her neck still wet with blood.

The security checkpoint seems dark after the spring sunlight, sterile after the factory, both too quiet and too loud. Zevat barks orders but Naprem can't seem to process her words - everything seems garbled and strange. Cardassian soldiers move past her, out of the checkpoint. Zevat moves her, bodily, grabbing her by the arm, guiding her forward.

And then, out of the chaos comes Dr. Ovig.

He's speaking to her. She's dizzy, disoriented - it sounds less like he's saying words and more like he's chewing tin. It's all noise. There’s so much noise. She can't breathe. He puts his hands on her shoulders - he's speaking to her, she just can't think. She feels sick.

He turns and says something to Zevat, who says something back - the whole world is so rife with _noise_.

Zevat pulls Naprem down the hall and she goes, steps clumsy and uneven. Zevat leads her to a concrete room with concrete walls, a tiny cube with a single cot and no windows. Ovig follows, helps her sit down on the cot. He's still speaking to her and she wants to scream - she doesn't _understand_ , she can't speak, she can't hear, she can't think. She can't breathe. Her heart is pounding in her ears. Her tongue is thick in her mouth. Zevat snaps at Ovig and he flinches, fumbling with his tools. Naprem doesn't scream. She sits there, nauseated, dizzy, breaths coming short and shallow.

A woman is dead. A woman is dead because of her.

Zevat claps her large hands on Naprem's shoulders, startling her from her state of fugue.

“Tora,” she says, sharply. “Be present.”

Naprem nearly is, for that one moment - she's there, Zevat’s hands on her shoulders, her back rigid, head pounding, neck sore. She's staring into Zevat’s face, feeling the weight of her big hands dwarfing her shoulders, and wondering how it is that she appears so calm, so unshaken. Is all this so easy for her? Was it easy for her to lift that phaser and fire? Doesn't it bother her at all that she's just ended another person’s life?

Does she even see them as people?

(She's a soldier. Surely this isn't the first time she's fired a phaser and watched someone on the other end of it die.)

The tide of panic and loss swallows her again, the waves closing over her head.

Ovig tries to talk to her, but she doesn't want to hear him. She lurches, belatedly, out of Zevat’s grasp. She looks away from her.

“Don't touch me,” she says.

Ovig speaks in her direction in a soft, soothing voice, and tries to move closer. Naprem cuts him off before she can process what he's saying.

“Don't _touch_ me,” she says again, and when he keeps talking, trying to soothe her, trying to come near, she raises her hands, crossing them over her body. “ _Don't._ Leave me in peace.”

Zevat catches her by the wrists and draws her hands down - Naprem struggles, but her grip is unyielding.

“Do it,” Zevat barks.

Ovig looks between them, opening his mouth as though he intends to argue. Zevat cuts him off.

“Ovig,” she says. “That wasn't a request.”

Ovig purses his lips and nods, drawing a small object out of his kit and wanding it slowly up over the back of Naprem’s neck and head. He brings it around the front of her, running it along the sides of her throat, and Naprem sees it out of the corner of her eye. With a jolt of shame, she recognizes the glossy black of the dermal regenerator. She looks up and finds Ovig watching her, brows creased with sadness. He traces it over the features of her face, and she knows he knows.

It's as he's finishing that Naprem hears the call come over Zevat’s wristbound.

“ _Backup requested in Factory 4_ ,” a voice rasps over the comm. “ _9-306 in progress_ \--”

Zevat snarls with frustration, crest flicking upwards. She releases Naprem's wrists and stands, bringing the comm to her chin,

“Glinn Zevat responding,” she says.

“ _Orders_ ,” the voice says. There's noise over the call, an ambient chaos Naprem struggles to make sense of. Two other Cardassians appear in the doorway, expressions somewhere between excitement and panic.

“Subdue and separate,” Zevat says. “Arrest the key aggressors and take them to Zevun.”

“ _I obey, sir._ ”

To Ovig, she says: “You're done. Come with me.”

Ovig flinches. “But… Miss Tora--”

“Is fine,” Zevat says. “Move.”

Ovig follows her, looking back at Naprem over his shoulder. Naprem slowly gets to her feet.

“Not you,” Zevat says. She steps out of the room with Ovig, keying a code into the pad beside the door. Without another word, she shuts it. Naprem hears the electronic lock shunt into place.

She stands there the silence booming in her ears.

Of course, she thinks. What else would she have meant? She sits down slowly.

Lockdown. She's on lockdown.

* * *

She imagines that she can hear the fighting - that she can hear the clamor, the shouting, the clash of Bajoran and Cardassian bodies. But of course she can't, not really. At times she believes she can - times when she knows, or at least she feels that, logically, it must already be over, perhaps _long_ over. The last time this happened it was over so quickly. But then, the last time this happened no one was dead.

The silence roars in her ears, deafening.

She sits very still for a long time. She's not sure why. She feels almost paralyzed - panic still buzzes in her blood, and she struggles to think clearly. Should she wait for Zevat to come back? She doesn't know. She doesn't understand the nature of her tenure in this room. Is she supposed to stay here? For how long? To what end? Is this her final destination or is she waiting to be transferred somewhere else? What is she supposed to be doing in the meantime? Is she going to be punished? She's done nothing wrong. She feels dizzy. Her scar _burns_ and she puts her hand to it, only to discover that she's shaking. She thinks of the ugly, shiny stripe of scar tissue that bisected the woman’s lip and she feels her stomach churn with revulsion. She was defending herself. They can't punish her for that, can they?

(Of course they can. They can do anything they like to her. They can imprison her, drag her from her home in the dead of night, throw her into the mud, scar her, beat her, toss her into this tiny hole for the rest of her life and no one will do a thing to stop them.)

She can't breathe. She can't swallow.

She touches the back of her neck and finds it still sticky with blood. She tiptoes her trembling fingers up to the back of her head where the cut should be, but there's no trace of it. She combs her fingers through the short, uneven sprigs of her hair, searching for it - a scab, a cut, even the slightest indentation of the skin - but there's nothing. It still aches, still itches, but the skin is unmarred, as though she imagined the whole thing. Her face is the same, and her throat - she doesn't feel the bite of new bruises, but she feels a general ache, as though her body is confused by their absence.

She feels increasingly dizzy. Heavy, like gravity is increasing, weighing her down with greater prejudice.

It's cold. The cell - and that's what it is, she thinks, a _cell_ \- is deeply, bitterly, bone-strikingly cold. There are no sources of warmth anywhere. The cement leeches it out of the air, giving the space a sour, sterile smell. Even the cot is cold - colder still when she moves, shifting out of the small space she's warmed with her body to press her back to the wall. She bites her lip; she can't tell if she's shaking because of the cold, but soon she can feel it in her chest. A flash of goosebumps pinches her chin and the inside of her wrists.

She doesn't know what to do. What _can_ she do? What is she _supposed_ to be doing? There's nothing in this room - just her. Just her, and her panic, and her dread.

She can't sit still now.

She gets up. She paces. It feels like her heart is rattling in her ribcage, vibrating like a tuning fork. What’s going to happen to her? What’s happening out there? Wouldn’t Zevat have come back if the danger was past? Where is she?

A riot - a _riot_ ? Prophets, Prophets, and she finds her lips moving - she’s praying aloud - how did it happen? _When_ did it happen? She didn’t hear it starting up behind her as she left - Prophets, her aunts, where are her aunts? What’s happening, what’s become of them, were they there? The dried blood on her neck itches terribly and she finds herself clawing at it, heart thudding in her mouth, on her tongue, between her teeth. Her aunts, in the middle of a riot, without her. In her mind she can almost see it - the crowd a living, seething thing, her aunts brittle, helpless, alone. She can hear it, she swears she can - she stops, ears straining. Did she? Did she hear something? A scream? A thud?

No, no - no. Of course not. There’s only her rasping, shallow breathing, lapping like small waves against the shore of her teeth. A small, wet sound, interspersed by the relentless pounding of her heart.

She closes her eyes - presses her hands against them.

She can’t do anything from in here. She has to wait this out. She has to. She has no choice. She has to wait, she has to--

She can’t _breathe_ , she can’t live like this; she suddenly can’t stand up for another second longer. She feels her knees start to give and lets herself down slowly, beside a small vent in the wall, which she presses herself to. It’s a slab of ice at her back. She presses to it so tightly that she can feel each of her ribs, each of her vertebrae. She presses her hands to her eyes and she tries to breathe slowly.

She prays. She holds her hands together and presses them to her chest, and with all that she is she reaches for the hands of the Prophets. In this tiny room, surrounded by cold, the wall hard against her back and the floor harder against her leg, her faith runs through her like an electric current. She closes her eyes and she puts all her frenetic, desperate energy into her words - she recites the same words she recited as a girl, and she tries to be outside her body.

“My blood is your blood,” she murmurs, and the words come out uneven. “My bones are your bones. My soul is yours - I am borne of you and I return to you.” She bites down, forces her breath to slow. She brings her knees up to her chest, trapping her hands against her heart, pressing her forehead to her knees. She whispers: “Your love finds me and my heart is full.”

She’s still fighting to keep her breath even. She bites her lip, eyes closed. But the back of her neck tingles.

“My blood is your blood,” she whispers. “My bones are your bones.”

And then, from behind her, she hears a familiar voice.

“Naprem?” it says. “Naprem, is that you?”

She jolts with surprise, spooking. “Hello? Who’s there?” She looks around, heart pounding, but of course there's no one. She bites her lip - she's hallucinating. She must be.

“Down here,” says the voice, and she could swear it's coming from behind her. She turns to look down - where are they? The floor? No, the vent. She kneels and presses her ear to the metal.

“Hello?” she says, feeling completely insane.

“Hello,” says the voice, and though it's hoarse and dry, Naprem finally recognizes it.

“Ede!” she gasps. “Is that you?”

“Who else?” Suga asks, with obvious relief. “It's good to hear your voice, my dear.”

_Naprem and Suga_ by [shevathegun](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ShevatheGun/works)

“This is where they're keeping you?” Naprem asks, head swimming. “Prophets, are you alright?”

“I'm alright,” he assures her, but he doesn't sound it. “I'm alive. That's all one can ask for, or so I'm told.”

Naprem tries to laugh, but it comes out sounding all wrong. A flood of emotion carves through her - relief and anguish in equal measure, guilt and anger and affection.

“Oh, Ede,” she says. “Ede, I'm sorry. I heard what happened.”

“You needn't apologize.”

“No, I _do_ ,” she says. “It was my fault you had it in the first place, I--”

“Nonsense,” Suga says, sharply. “I agreed to it, you didn't force me - and keep your voice down. As far as the Cardassians know, you had nothing to do with it. I’d like to keep it that way.”

Naprem flushes, choking back her words.

“You don't need to protect me,” she says. “If it means they might go easier on you--”

“Let them punish me,” Suga says. “If I can spare you any harm, I'll do it.”

Naprem’s heart aches. She presses herself to the wall ever tighter.

“Have they hurt you, Ede?”

He's quiet for a moment.

“It’s nothing I can't handle,” he says, and she hears the prideful lie for what it is.

“You don't need to protect me.”

“I _do_ ,” he insists. “I'm quite fond of you, my dear. One does not bring such things upon those they're quite fond of.”

Naprem flushes deeper and struggles to find something to say. Suga beats her to it.

“I admit, I wasn't expecting to speak to you again so soon.”

“I, no,” Naprem says, fumbling for her words. “No, I imagine you weren't. There's been - that is, I-- Do you remember the woman from the riot?”

“Which one?”

“The one who started it all. You remember.”

“I'm afraid I don't,” Suga says. “There were so many people.”

“...right,” Naprem says, after a moment, shame mixing in with everything else, like concrete mix in paint. “Right, of course.”

“Naprem,” Suga says. “What's happened?”

Naprem opens her mouth. The words congeal in the back of her throat, sitting in her stomach like cold, heavy sick.

“Naprem,” Suga says.

“They killed her.” She almost gags, saying it out loud. “We got into an altercation and… they killed her.”

Suga’s silent on the other side of the wall for a long time.

“Are you hurt?” he asks, finally. His voice is disturbingly even.

“I…” She doesn't know how to answer. “I was. They fixed it all when they brought me in.”

“She attacked you?”

“I think she was trying to kill me.”

“But you're alright,” Suga says, insistently, as though saying it will make it true.

“I'm _alive_ ,” she says, stealing his words. “I'm not _alright._ ”

Suga goes quiet again. Naprem finds his silence unnerving - just before he speaks again, she's beginning to wonder, hysterically, if she only imagined him being there.

“We knew this was something the Cardassians were capable of,” he says, startling her. She bites her lip to avoid a pending outburst - that she knew they were capable of this, but he couldn't possibly. He didn't know, the girls didn't know, and when she warned them, they ignored her.

She crushes her eyes shut, heart pounding as she presses her forehead to her knees. She feels like _she's_ the one who took a phaser blast to the chest.

“Naprem,” Suga says. “You mustn't blame yourself for this.”

Naprem curls into an even tighter ball, legs tucked tight to her chest.

“You didn't kill her,” Suga says. “The Cardassian did that.”

Naprem can't find the words to reply. When she tries, it feels like she's choking. Her eyes burn.

“Anyone who would attack you is a traitor to the Bajoran people,” Suga continues.

“Ede!”

“It’s true,” he insists, and she doesn't know if she should laugh or cry - he sounds so utterly ridiculous. It's an absurd thing to say, and yet he sounds so sincere.

“You shouldn't say things like that.”

“I mean every word. Your life is precious, my dear - anyone who would threaten to steal you away from us does not deserve to be called my countryman.”

He makes her feel so strange - she’s both touched and unnerved by his earnestness, by the passionate poetry of his words. Her face is hot with a flush.

Then she remembers a woman is dead because of her, and the bottom of her stomach drops out.

“Please, Ede,” she says.

He seems to sense what she’s thinking, and changes the subject.

“How long do they intend to hold you here?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she says.

Suga sighs, sounding disappointed. “Well, my dear, I suppose that makes two of us.” He tuts and she imagines him shaking his head. “How unlucky.”

“I hope the girls are alright,” Naprem says, softly.

“Don’t think about that,” Suga warns her. “We can’t do anything for them right now one way or another. We’re in enough trouble without torturing ourselves with hypotheticals.”

There’s a sound, then, from Suga’s side of the wall.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to cut this short,” he says in a rush.

“Ede? What’s happening?”

“ _Hush_ ,” Suga says, and then there’s a soft sound that can only be the hiss of a door opening.

Naprem feels something twist in her chest - some desperate, unbearable fright - and she moves to her knees, pressing her ear to the grate, trying to hear what’s happening. She can hear someone’s voice; an unfamiliar someone, not Suga or, as she’d thought for just a moment, Zevat. Someone else, with a rasping, droning voice, saying words she can’t quite decipher. They’re tinny, incomprehensible shapes from the other side of the grate. It’s a long time before she hears Suga say anything in reply - a long time where that one, rasping voice says many things, none of which she can decipher, getting closer, then further away. She hears slow, measured footsteps - pacing? Are they pacing? They must be, slowly pacing around the room, speaking slowly in that calm, rasping voice.

But eventually, Suga says something back - she recognizes the sound of his voice, muted and imprecise though it is. What’s happening? She can’t tell, she can’t hear a thing they’re saying to one another.

Then, Suga shouts, and Naprem jumps back, scared out of her skin. He shouts once, and then it tapers off. The other voice speaks slowly, a strange mutter at this distance. Suga must say something else, but she can’t hear it - her ears are buzzing, hot with blood - until he shouts again, longer this time, agonized - a shout that crescendos to a scream, tearing through her room.

They go back and forth, back and forth - that slow, rasping voice and Suga’s belabored one, breaking into fragments, then bursting out of him in the most violent of ways. Naprem swears she hears him sob, and as soon as she does, she tries very much to unhear it.

It goes on and on like that. The sounds echo around her room, seeping in like poison, like ice cold water, and she’s drowning in them. Her lungs fail her, inflating around nothing, filling with sound instead of air - her mouth is open and gasping, her ears burning with noise. Every cry rips through her chest. She pushes herself to the cot, pushes herself as far as she can from the sound to no avail - it’s all around her, it’s inside of her. It’s clawing her heart out and she presses her hands to her ears but it comes in anyway. Every scream rattles her bones and burns in her molars.

Even after it finally, finally stops, she can’t catch her breath. She stays on her cot, gasping, cheeks wet and cold, body rattling. She waits to hear Suga speak again, but he says nothing. She hears nothing more through the grate; no screaming, and no soothing words.

Alone in the silence, she thinks of the woman - she thinks of Suga, gone that quiet and still. She shakes, and she pants, and her vision tunnels. She shakes until she can no longer feel her hands or her lips or her tongue. She shakes until she cannot think or see. The silence tears her apart with the ruthless efficiency of a predator with nothing better to do.

* * *

She isn’t aware of when she loses consciousness, but she comes to all at once, just as her own door is sliding open.

She didn’t fall asleep - that wasn’t what it was. She hyperventilated until she fainted sitting upright, which isn’t nearly the same thing. When her door opens, she’s in the same position - back to the wall, knees to her chest, face gummy with barely-dried tears. Her whole body aches - even her eyes as she looks up. Zevat steps through the doorway and Naprem’s heart makes a dull thud as it drops to the floor of her chest.

She doesn’t move as Zevat reaches back to close the door. She looks tired, headfeathers slightly askew, sticking up at odd angles, spoon flushed dark blue, gray skin distinctly pale, dark circles under her eyes. She takes a breath, looking bitter and annoyed. She turns her eyes on Naprem and they look at one another for a long time.

Naprem thinks maybe she ought to stand up, but as soon as she thinks it, Zevat shakes her head, like she’s read her mind.

“You’ve caused me one hell of a headache today, Tora.”

Naprem stares at her. She can think of nothing to say.

Zevat seems dissatisfied with her silence. She frowns deeper, pulling her lips into a tight, thin line.

“Is this what you wanted?” she snaps, gesturing to the room with one hand. “Is this what you were aiming for? Chaos? Upheaval? You know, I had no intention of taking Tirek’s opinion of you seriously. But you’re making a fool out of me. Every time I turn around, you’re making trouble.”

“Is this what I wanted?” Naprem repeats, her voice tiny in her ears.

Zevat looks back at her. She raises a browridge expectantly.

“Is this what I _wanted_?” Naprem asks again, louder this time. Her voice shakes.

“That’s what I said.”

“Why in _heavens_ would I want this?” Naprem asks, ragged and breathless all over again. “A woman is dead. Everyone I care about is in danger. I’m in a cell barely big enough to walk in, and you want to know if this is what I _wanted_ ? _No_ , Glinn Zevat, this is _not_ what I wanted. Nobody in their right mind would want this, which I think you well know!” She’s not sure when she started shouting, but it feels _right_ \- like she’s discharging static, like she meant to do this all along. “All I want is to live my life in peace, which your very presence on this planet precludes, so who, between us, is ‘making trouble’?!”

Zevat narrows her eyes. “I am doing my duty.”

“Your ‘duty’ is to cause us misery!”

“Whether or not you’re miserable is none of my concern,” Zevat snarls. “My duty is to keep order.”

“There’s no difference!” Naprem’s face feels so hot that it’s going numb. “One demands the other!”

“It wouldn’t,” Zevat says, “if you didn’t insist on being difficult.”

“I’ve done nothing wrong!” Naprem shouts.

“You’ve done _plenty_ ,” Zevat says, and Naprem sees the light flash over her sharp teeth.

“I’ve done nothing but be Bajoran!” Naprem feels the hot plugs of tears welling behind her eyes - it _hurts_ , everything hurts. “That is my _only_ crime! Being Bajoran in the wrong place at the wrong time!”

Zevat turns her head, nostrils flaring. Her fists are clenched at her sides, neck ridges flared out in a dominance display she appears to be muscling down. She won’t look Naprem in the eye.

“We make it very easy here,” she says, jaw tight. “We make it so easy to follow the rules - all that we ever ask is that you toe the line. That you do as we say, when we say it.”

“You hold us prisoner on our own planet!”

“That wasn’t my choice!” Zevat barks, whipping her head around. “I don’t make military policy, Tora!”

“You enforce it!” Naprem cries.

“That is my _job_!” Zevat shouts, her low voice cutting through the cold. “That is what I am here to do! And it is a job a thousand other Cardassians are qualified for, so if you’d like them to come here and do it, keep pushing! See if it gets you someone even half as willing to entertain your delusions of justice.”

Anger flares through Naprem’s chest, a flash of red in the darkness.

“You can’t be both my ally and my enemy,” she says.

Zevat looks back at her, nostrils flaring, brow twisted with anger that looks suspiciously like remorse.

“I’ve tried to be your ally,” she says. “We see where that’s gotten us.”

Then, she turns and opens the door. Naprem springs to her feet, unable to stop herself. Being upright leaves her dizzy.

“Wait! Wait--”

And like a blessing, Zevat pauses. She turns her head just so, giving Naprem her good ear. Naprem, not having expected this one last kindness, freezes up. She flubs, jaw working soundlessly as she struggles to find the words.

“The riot,” she says, voice clumsy with anger and with desperation. “My aunts, are they--”

“They’re fine. We’re holding them in the detention center, for the time being.” Zevat says this the way she says everything - with no inflection, no emotion. She speaks as though she never broke with this blunt, purely factual delivery to be, for a second, as real a person as Naprem has ever seen her.

Even her honesty is somehow dishonest, Naprem thinks.

“For the moment,” Zevat continues, “none of you are safe in general population.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we’ll have to keep you here indefinitely, until you can be placed.”

“Indefinitely?” Naprem repeats.

“It’s for your own good,” Zevat says, and then she’s keying in her code, and walking through the doorway.

“Zevat, wait--”

But Zevat’s done waiting. The door shuts, and Naprem’s left alone, less one more ally than she ever knew she had.

* * *

After that, it's hard to keep track of time.

No one comes to see her. No one speaks to her from the other side of the vent. She listens for a long time, but Suga never arrives again to speak to her, and his torturer never arrives to force the issue. She hears nothing on his side of the vent - no pacing, no sign of life.

Every once in awhile, someone lifts the grate on the bottom of her door, and slides a tray of food into her room. If she leaves it there, either empty or full, they take it away again sometime later. If she doesn't, they don’t feed her again until she does. Once, she keeps it away for a long, long time - until she's too weak to stay awake anymore, until hunger burns her inside out and she faints to escape it. When she comes to, the bare tray is gone, and there's another, identical one in its place. And the game is over.

She gets water from the small sink in the corner. It's the only thing in the room that moves. Sometimes she plays with it - watches the water run and run, eyes tracing over the particulates, each drop, each piece of the stream as it rushes past or swirls around the drain. The sink isn't deep enough for her to drown herself in. She only attempts it once. Just to see if it's possible.

There is no one and nothing. No way to keep time. No way to pass it, either. She tries to track the days, but the lights never turn off, and the food seems to appear at random. She sleeps all the time, because there's nothing better to do. It's always too cold. Her body aches constantly, either from lying down or standing up. When she sleeps, she dreams of this room. She dreams that someone somewhere is screaming, but she can't get to them, can't see them. When she lies awake, there's nothing to look at but the ceiling and the floor. Sometimes, she paces. Sometimes, she stares for hours at her fingers, or her legs.

They only let her out once in awhile to shower. This, she deduces, must be conducted according to some sort of schedule. The first time it happens, as the guard walks her to the showers, his hand tight around her arm, she can't help but bombard him with questions. It's the first time she's seen anyone since Zevat left her, and she wants to know how long it's been, when she'll get out, what time it is, where her aunts are, why they're keeping her here, who they think they are. She asks questions, endless questions, a watery stream of questions rushing past, and by the time they reach the end of the hallway, even the guard’s obvious annoyance gives her a burst of relief.

“Stop talking,” he suggests.

But that's not fair to ask - not after so long alone. She can't stop talking. It's the only thing that fills the silence. When she's back in her room, it's all there is to do. Halfway through what she thinks - what she _prays_ \- is the first week, she gives in and claws at the door, bangs on it, slams her body against it, demands, with growing urgency, to be let out. No one comes to pacify her, or to bandage her torn knuckles. And so she’s forced to speak to herself. There's no one else to speak to.

It feels like she's losing her mind.

She speaks very softly - narrates her thoughts. She prays. She hums. She tries to count the seconds but that just makes her tearful and shaky. She rehearses conversations, relives them, repeats her own words back to herself, retracing her tongue over the ghosts of her humiliation. She beats herself, bludgeons her chest and her thighs with the stone club of her shame - stupid, stupid, stupid and naive, stupid to get herself into this situation. Every stupid thing crosses her mind a thousand times a day - or at least, she thinks it does. The lights stay on in her cell 26 hours a day, never fading, never waning. The meals come seemingly at random. It's very hard to know when a day begins and when it ends, or if they're passing at all. But they must be passing.

Right? They must be passing.

* * *

So few things happen to her in this period that her own life begins to feel like a series of vignettes:

During one of her showers, she catches the guard watching her. When she looks back at him, he doesn’t look away. She feels a detached sort of revulsion, the telltale tug of dread, the retreating wave that preempts a catastrophe. He doesn’t do anything while dragging her back to her room, but he flings her in with more force than is strictly necessary. There is no one to report him to. The next time her door opens, there’s a different guard there. She never sees the other guard again, after that.

One day, she awakes to sounds on the other side of the vent. She gets up, and moves over to crouch beside the wall. She can’t make out anything - but she could swear she hears three voices instead of one. One is vaguely familiar; she could swear she’d heard it before, but she can’t say where. The second is the rasping voice she heard before, when it was Suga on the other side of the wall. The third - the third, she realizes, is Zevat’s. But she can’t make out anything they’re saying, and when, finally, they fall silent, she’s forced to retire to bed without anything to show for her trouble.

Once, she dreams of her mother. She dreams that she’s sitting in her cell with her mother behind her on the bed, braiding her hair. She keeps trying to turn to face her, but her mother keeps forcing her head around so that she’s facing the far wall, tutting and scolding her under her breath. Naprem can feel her deft fingers moving carefully through her hair, much longer than she thinks it should be, and she can smell her familiar smell: the pungent, sour smell of oil paint and the soft scent of freshly-turned earth. When she wakes up, the only smell in her room is the cold cement. Her hair is sheared short, and she is utterly, achingly alone.

* * *

The walls are getting closer. She swears, she _swears_ the walls are beginning to close in around her and every once in awhile it feels like she’s going to choke to death on all this stale air. She tries the starving trick again, but they’re smarter this time; they take her tray when she’s asleep and replace it, and she wakes up before they’re through, but she’s too hungry and exhausted to get up, to fight them. Some days, she screams and beats the walls just to feel something, just to hear her own voice echoing against the concrete. Her thoughts move in unpredictable, drunken spirals. Frequently, she catches herself staring at the wall, head painfully empty. What is there to think with no new stimulus, no new information, no developments, no conversations?

Once, just once, she’s standing in the shower when the compulsion to run overtakes her and she tears off, naked. She only gets a short ways from the showers, and they drag her back to her room wet and screaming. The cold is so much colder when she’s wet.

She forgets even that, as soon as it happens - replays it a thousand times in her mind, then forgets it happened. It seems like a story told to her by a stranger, as though she’s imagined her own life. She feels utterly detached from her own body, which continues living in spite of the shrieking agony of her mind.

* * *

She has no way to know how long it’s been when Zevat finally reenters her cell. Fourteen showers, she thinks - but some of them could’ve been imagined, or forgotten. She has no way to know.

Zevat, when she walks in, looks different. Naprem can’t place what it is, exactly - perhaps it’s the way she holds herself. Her proud shoulders seem hunched forward, and her long, glossy headfeathers are flat to her head, a sure sign of displeasure.

“Tora,” she says. “Get up.”

Naprem looks at her, then down at herself. She stands. Zevat looks at her, scrutinizing her for what feels like a little too long.

“What’s going on?” Naprem asks.

“You’re being reassigned,” Zevat says.

“Where?”

“Records. Let's go.”

“Records?” Naprem feels rooted to the spot. This is the longest her door has been open since they brought her here. “I don’t understand. Where are my aunts? What's going on?”

“Your aunts are fine. Let’s _go_.”

“Glinn Zevat--”

“Tora,” Zevat says sharply, interrupting her. “I’m _letting you out_. Stop making that difficult - you either come with me, or you stay here until we transfer you. What’s it going to be?”

At the time, it’s so sudden that she can think of nothing to say - no argument, no alternative. Leave this room now or leave it never; even with the mere suggestion of the freedom on the other side of the door, there’s only one choice she can possibly make. But it’s been so long since she’s been tasked with the decision that the very process eludes her for a moment.

Well, she can’t stay _here._ If she’s here for another minute, it will kill her. She’s sure of it.

She walks, haltingly, to Zevat’s side. Zevat pushes the door open wider and she steps out into the hall. She almost looks back at the room, before realizing that there’s no reason to - there is nothing to look back at.

It’s deeply anticlimactic, in the end. One minute, she’s in the room. The next, she isn’t. Her lockdown ends as abruptly as it began - this time, for reasons so abstract that she struggles to comprehend them. It feels as if at any moment, someone will realize there’s been a mistake, and put her back - or worse, that she’s about to wake up, and find that her freedom was a dream all along, which makes more sense, in the end, than the alternative, and makes her clench her fists tight, every step that she takes back towards freedom.

* * *

The halls feel narrower since the last time she was dragged down them - maybe it’s just the way her breath is catching in her throat. She’s waiting for the catch, watching Zevat’s back, her broad shoulders. She’s keeping up, trotting along behind her, as obedient as a trained mouse.

They walk down the corridor and around a bend, through an unfamiliar archway, down a flight of stairs. Each new hall bares another row of doors -- there are no windows, no hint of what lies within. Are there other Bajorans inside? She can’t help but wonder. Is there someone behind each door she passes, wishing they could claw their way out?

She’s chewing her lip, pulling at her fingers, when they finally reach the end of the hallway, and Zevat shoves the door open.

The sunlight is such a shock she forgets to breathe.

She forgot - she _forgot_ \- how could she have forgotten? She’s been so cold for so long, so accustomed to the cold and the dark that the sea breeze on her face, the smell of the forest in bloom, the brilliant gleam of the sun is almost enough to bring her to tears. She feels _bruised_ \- beneath her skin, beneath her bones. Something inside her opens up again, peaking its face out after a long, cold winter and squinting around. It’s excruciating - it’s dizzying, disorienting. The sun kisses her face, runs its hands over her arms. She wraps her arms around herself and squeezes tight, to be sure she’s real.

She blinks, shuddering a little, feeling like a newborn. The sunlight catches in her eyelashes like dew. Zevat’s stopped in her tracks, and she’s standing there, staring at her. Naprem can’t read the look on her face - it might be pity, but that seems far-fetched. It might be wariness, discomfort. That seems more likely.

“Come on,” she says. Her voice is softer than Naprem expected it would be.

Perhaps it is a look of pity, after all.

* * *

The courtyard is shockingly empty. As they step out onto the dirt, Naprem has the sensation of walking through a dream, where the features of her waking life are simple props to her subconscious. Zevat leads and she follows, waiting to see… _someone_. Anyone, really. There’s no one but Cardassians standing around, guarding the entrance to the factories, eyeing her as she passes. She can hear the crank of the nets as they reel them in, the whirr of the machines. In the distance, she can hear shouting from the cliff climbers over the roar of the surf. She hurries to keep pace with Zevat, feeling short of breath and unnerved.

They cross the courtyard into the shadow of Factory 6. Naprem looks up at it, at the way the sun catches along the edges of its outline against the sky. It looms in her vision, a dark monolith swathed in shadow.

Zevat holds her gauntlet to a key reader near the door. It chimes, and the door slides open to let them through. Naprem feels her heart sink, her feet snag at the entrance, toes digging into the dirt at the edge of the threshold. Beyond the door, the factory is dark. Naprem can feel the cold oozing out; goosebumps rise on her arms and the back of her neck.

But Zevat simply stands there, staring at her, waiting. Naprem’s forgotten the powerful compulsion of being waited on. And so, in spite of her rising dread, she steps over the threshold, and follows her inside.

The door closes behind them. The first thing that hits Naprem is the cold - the second is the overpowering smell of raw fish. It smacks her in the face with such force that she winces. After months without it, the smell is almost unbearable; so strong she can _taste it_ , thick and oily, so salty it makes her eyes water. They walk down a short set of steps, down a cement passage stacked on either side with huge metal crates. At the end of the passageway, they walk through a pair of glass doors that seem newer than anything else in the facility.

Through the glass doors, they step into a small compartment. Naprem looks up as a white light whisks over her and a low buzzing fills the air. After about ten seconds, there’s a chime above them, and the doors on the other side of the compartment slide open.

“ _Decontamination sequence complete_ ,” says a computerized voice. Naprem jumps with surprise, but Zevat steps out into the next room and she's forced to follow after her.

As she steps into the room, lined on either side by rows and rows of pink cubes held in stasis, she realizes that this must be where the smell is coming from. The room reeks of fish. It's overpowering this close. She even sees Zevat put a hand over her nose to stifle it. She waves Naprem on, and she doesn't have to tell her twice - they hurry through the room to another decontamination station identical to the first, and when they step out on the other side, Naprem breathes a sigh of relief.

The third room is a dark, open space lined on either side by rows of conveyor belts. At the end of the belts stand large columns - chutes, Naprem deduces, leading here from the factory above.

At the far end of the room, hunched over his PADD, stands a man who looks vaguely familiar to her, though she can't say why. He's short and thin, wearing a bright yellow tunic with his hair twisted up into a knot at the back of his head. He's jabbing the screen of his PADD with a bony finger, muttering to himself.

“Ovig,” Zevat says, and the man snaps to attention. He whips around and folds his hands behind his back, jutting out his chin.

“Glinn Zevat,” he says, in a clear attempt to be proper. He looks from her to Naprem, who wonders if he means to scowl or if it's simply what his face does naturally when left to it's own devices. “Is this her, then?” He purses his lips, squinting at her. “The _criminal_?”

Naprem feels her stomach sink to her toes. She'd forgotten the sunlight, and so too had she forgotten what it felt like to be on the receiving end of such senseless contempt. She turns to Zevat.

“I changed my mind,” she murmurs. “I’d like to go back.”

“Too late,” Zevat murmurs back, and then, continuing on at a normal volume she says, “This is Tora. Tora, this is Ovig. The other one.”

“I presume he has a personal name,” Naprem says.

“Not one that _you_ need to know,” snaps Ovig. “If Yaien’s been so bold as to give you his, that's his own fault.”

“Even if he hadn't, you just have,” Naprem points out.

Ovig turns to Zevat, looking indignant. “I won't stand for this - I...” He pauses, red faced, tripping over his momentum. “...I _demand_ you give me someone qualified.”

Zevat's face doesn't change. In fact, she looks bored. But she slowly flares out her ridges, squaring her shoulders, drawing up on her digitigrade legs until she's looming over him, seeming to fill the room.

“Ovig,” she says, lowly. “I'm being very generous. If you want an assistant, this is who you get.”

Ovig swallows thickly, Adam's apple bobbing as he struggles not to cower.

“Fine,” he says. “Fine then.”

Zevat slowly descends, posture relaxing.

“Good,” she says. “I'll be back to get her at the end of the day.”

“What?” Naprem asks, incredulous. “You can't mean I'm going to start _now_.”

Zevat raises a brow ridge.

“Have other plans?”

Naprem knows better than to say she doesn't. She flushes and bites her lip.

“I'll be back at 1900 hours,” Zevat says to Ovig.

“Of course you will,” Ovig says, with no small amount of bitterness. The cold of the room can't compare to his personal unpleasantness.

* * *

“Have you ever used a PADD?” Ovig asks.

“Briefly,” Naprem says.

It’s surreal to be subjected so abruptly to that far-off memory: the devices had hardly made it into circulation at the highest level when they’d shut down Ankala University. Headmaster Vemi had brought her the device himself, his dark cheeks shining with excitement, and they’d examined it in her office. All at once she remembers her office - the smell of oiled wood and paper, the way the sun used to fall through the windows in the late afternoon as she sat there grading papers. She remembers the way it caught on the matte surface of the screen, the marvel of holding such a powerful computer in the palm of her hand.

‘ _Imagine_ ,’ Vemi had said to her, ‘ _the things our students would be capable of with this type of technology readily at their disposal_.’

Ovig appears a man incapable of that sort of imagination. He seems incapable, even, of imagining she’s telling the truth.

“If you stole a PADD from a Cardassian, that doesn’t count,” he says.

“I didn’t,” Naprem says, not bothering to hide her offense.

“I don’t want you breaking this,” Ovig sneers. “It’s very expensive.”

Naprem promptly imagines breaking it over Ovig’s self-important head.

“Yes,” she says instead. “I imagine it is.”

Ovig ‘hrumphs’, scowling down at his PADD and walking down the aisle. Naprem stands there, motionless, until he turns to glower at her over his shoulder.

“Well, come on,” he says. “I don’t have all day.”

She follows behind him - they walk slowly down the aisle, through the rows upon rows of pink blocks.

“As you know,” Ovig says, gesturing with a bony hand, “Zarpek is an esteemed fishery and processing plant. The meat we process here is converted into raw components which can be used by any modern replication or materialization unit. Each cube you see here contains the raw protein necessary to fuel a standard home replicator for up to seven years.”

“A _replicator_?” Naprem repeats.

“A food synthesizer,” Ovig says, clearly annoyed that she interrupted him. “Of sorts. Obviously, it synthesizes more than food, but that doesn’t concern you, or any of our work here. Now, what I _need_ is someone who can inventory our warehouses properly, so that I can do the proper testing to be sure none of our product is contaminated.”

“Contaminated? With what?”

“Oh, any number of things - it’s none of your business, but these raw component cubes can be easily sullied by any contact with material or bacterial contaminants. Usually, they’re eliminated by the deconstitution process, or any of the subsequent sterilization countermeasures, but it’s my job to be sure. _Your_ job is to count, assuming you can. We’ll start with this warehouse. And if I’m satisfied with your work - and so far, I am _not_ \- you’ll be responsible for inventorying the rest. And the new product, as it's made.”

Naprem can’t help but gape at him a little. “For how long?”

Ovig’s head swivels around.

“For as long as there’s product to inventory!” he says.

“So… _forever_ , then.”

“Oh please,” Ovig mutters under his breath. “We’ll be lucky if we can keep this racquet going another six months.” He jabs the PADD into her hands. “Get to work, will you? We don’t have all day.”

* * *

 

All that time in the room has nothing at all on the mundanity of counting component cubes. There are pallets upon pallets, stacked twenty cubes high by twenty columns deep. Without the PADD, she’d get lost among them all, and start counting them twice. She very nearly does - but the software won’t let her recount a pallet without an administrator override, which she blessedly does not have.

It would be simple enough if all the pallets were uniformly stacked, but many of them aren’t - they’re missing cubes on the sides, or the top, or (most frustratingly) in the middle. When she asks about it, Ovig confirms her suspicions.

“Contaminated,” he says.

“With what?” she asks.

“That’s not your concern,” he snaps. “Get back to work.”

She does, because the alternative is hardly tempting - she can hardly believe how deeply unpleasant this Ovig is, when Dr. Ovig is so kind and amiable. Obviously, Dr. Ovig is capable of callousness - by accident or ignorance - but his brother is such miserable company Naprem would rather strike up conversation with the component cubes.

She walks from one end of the room to the other, counting pallet after pallet. The concrete floor is hard on her - it makes her feet ache, and her legs, and her back. It’s been a long time since she’s had to stand upright for such an extended period, and the task is so boring and so simple that she’s worried she’s doing it wrong. The only thing worse than counting this entire warehouse once would be to have to count it twice.

By the time Zevat arrives at 1900 hours, she's convinced she's doing it wrong. But when Ovig takes the PADD back, he sniffs, and dips his head. Zevat gives him an expectant look and he shrugs, lower lip jutting out.

“Her performance is...adequate,” he says.

“Good,” Zevat says.

“Her attitude could use some work,” Ovig interjects.

“ _My_ attitude?” Naprem snaps.

“Your problem now,” Zevat says. “Not mine. Let's go, Tora.”

Naprem follows her back through the decontamination chamber, then up the stairs and out of the warehouse. As they walk back out into the courtyard, the warm, humid air gives her a chill. She shivers, rubbing her arms, looking around the empty courtyard.

The silence between them feels awkward. Naprem wants to speak but doesn't know what to say. She doesn't know whether she ought to be grateful, or resent her. Either one demands at least some sort of verbal acknowledgement. But neither one feels quite right - and Zevat says nothing to sway her one way or the other. How profoundly strange, Naprem thinks, to owe so much to a person and yet to be unable to decide how to feel about them. Is Zevat a villain, she wonders? Does she get a perverse pleasure from all of this? The answer seems obvious, and yet they're at odds. It's the world that's pitted them against one another, she realizes that -- but in the end, perhaps that's all there is. Perhaps it is only natural that they have nothing to say to one another. Zevat is no more a villain than Naprem is a criminal. But there's no question in Naprem's mind, even now, that they are enemies.

The thought presses her heart flat in her chest, like a flower between the pages of a heavy book. As they cross the courtyard, it feels as though the shadows of the buildings, lengthened in the coming twilight, are chasing her.

* * *

 

Stepping back into the detention center is like walking willingly into the mouth of a great animal. The door slides shut behind them and Naprem’s wrists begin to ache. Maybe she isn’t done with the room after all. Maybe that’s where she’ll be expected to sleep. Maybe the worst of the two Ovig’s and Glinn Zevat will be her only company, and she’ll be forced to move through the camp like a ghost, only ever appearing when there’s no one around to see her.

But instead of leading her towards the cells, Zevat takes a turn down a familiar hallway, one where the light seems to shine brighter. Naprem follows after, and soon she realizes - they’re walking to Dr. Ovig’s clinic.

The door is open when they arrive. The doctor is packing up his bag at his desk. As he arranges instruments for the trip home, his face bears the quiet exhaustion of someone who can only afford to be tired when they’re alone. But when he glances up, his face alights, radiant with pleasure.

“Miss Tora!” he gasps.

And that would be enough, Naprem thinks - that simple, uncomplicated pleasure of a kind face, a kind word for the first time in months. That would be enough, if not for the other two people in the room: her aunts, both looking at her like she’s risen from the dead.

“Naprem!” Uru gasps, and Naprem’s heart lurches in her chest.

“Naprem!” Onea shouts, and she can’t possibly get to them fast enough. She crosses the room and they run to her - it’s not a big room, but any distance at all feels like too much. They throw their arms around her and for the first time in so long she’s home. She’s _home_.

They crush in around her, bony old limbs like tree branches. She can feel their breath, smell their sweet smell. Being held is like the sunlight - she somehow managed to forget how unbearably nice it is. Onea wraps around her neck and Uru around her waist, and Naprem finds her arms wrapped around both their shoulders. She presses forehead to Uru’s and all at once she can’t catch her breath.

“Oh, my good girl,” Onea murmurs. “My beautiful, sweet girl…”

“Blessed be the Prophets,” Uru whispers. “They brought you back to us…”

Naprem tries to swallow the whimper in the back of her mouth. She can’t find words enough to express the ache in her chest, the immensity of the love she feels and how it burns through her, fire across famished earth.

If Zevat and Dr. Ovig say anything at all, she can’t hear it over the wild, wanton ringing of her heart. Belatedly, long after she should have, Naprem realizes that they’ve closed the door to the clinic and left them alone. It doesn’t matter - she can’t think of anything else but her aunts, she can’t feel anything but their warmth and their breath. She can’t be anywhere but right here.

 _Home._ She’s finally home.


End file.
